


Of Honey, Sulphur, and Bone

by aryanightshade



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Abduction, Attempted Amputation, BAMF Chloe Decker, Blood Loss, Chloe is awesome and a good problem solver, F/M, Hurt Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Hurt/Comfort, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Devil Reveal, Lucifer is afraid, Lucifer suffers a lot, Murder, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Post-Episode: s03e24 A Devil of My Word, Protective Chloe Decker, Psychological Torture, Torture, Whump, Wing Grooming, Wing injuries, cain is a psychopath, chloe worries about Lucifer's mental health, graphic depictions of injures, i steal the plot from 4x5, so much whump you have no idea, this gets very dark and violent so mind the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:35:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aryanightshade/pseuds/aryanightshade
Summary: During the fight with Peirce, Lucifer underestimates Pierce’s ruthlessness. It’s just for a second, but one second is all it takes for it all to go wrong. Or, once again the Sinnerman takes Lucifer to the desert, but this time they have company.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a oneshot I don't know what happened  
complete, will post a new chapter every few days :)

Chloe slams the door of her cruiser and cranes her head back as she hits the auto lock. Lucifer scurries ahead of her, his footsteps eager in violent anticipation. She knows him well enough to see the rage coursing quietly along the set of his shoulders. It’s vindicating, knowing that someone else is just as mad as she is. Just as ready to take Marcus down for killing Charlotte, for lying and manipulating all of them. 

For fooling her into thinking he loved her. 

“The sister’s loft should be right up here.” 

“Alright.” She blinks the haze of tiredness from her eyes. In all the fear and drama persisting of the last thirty-six hours, she hasn’t slept, and it’s beginning to wear on her. Her eyes feel gritty and dry, and her reflexes are starting to feel worryingly sluggish. 

Lucifer glances back over his shoulder and slows. “Detective.”

She should be focusing in this, on apprehending Marcus before he can hurt anyone else, but… she reaches up and drags her hand over her scalp in agitation. “This is all my fault.” Even after Charlotte, Lucifer has been taking up a large portion of her mental and emotional real estate. More than she would care to admit. That’s usually the way of it, though. He’s become such an important part of her life, and she wonders how that happened.

“What? No, no, no, you can’t blame yourself for Pierce,” Lucifer says quickly, turning back, leading the way through the dirty alleyway. She gets the feeling he’s avoiding making eye contact with her. Lucifer doesn’t lie, so he says, but he does obfuscate the truth- this whole fucking thing with Pierce is proof enough of that- and his face is easy to read, at least to her. 

Chloe studies the back of his head. She doesn’t understand him. Sometimes, it’s like he’s peeling back the layers of her flesh, looking right into her soul, seeing the very truth of her being, and other times, it’s like he doesn’t know her at all. Not just her. People in general. She thinks back to the scars on his back, an image that’s been plaguing her more and more often these last few months. An image that she can’t stop seeing since their harsh conversation in the interrogation room a few weeks ago when he had decided, for some unfathomable reason, to take god-knows how many drugs and stop sleeping, and how he had come undone in front her, spouting on about Marcus being Cain from the Bible and not being able to control his wings, lost in his delusions.  
“No, you were right,” she says. “You tried to warn me about him, and I didn’t listen to you.” She shakes her head, twisting the thoughts over in her mind. Despite all of his faults, Lucifer isn’t stupid. Somehow, he had seen something that the rest of them had missed and had slotted it into his pear-shaped world view. He had known Marcus was a bad guy, and in his deluded mind, had equated him with the original murderer. She can’t fault him for that. 

Chloe hates to admit how much seeing Lucifer like that had scared her. Lucifer has never been the most stable person, years of working together has shown her that over and over, but she always manages to overlook his weirdness in favor of their friendship. Now, though, it is getting harder and harder to ignore that he is someone who is mentally ill and needs help. “Although, who could believe anything you say. Angels, demons, immortal men.” It’s like a scab that she can’t stop picking. That maybe if she scratches at it enough, he’ll stop with all of these wild stories and just be. 

Lucifer twists and gestures at her emphatically as he strides forwards. “Detective, I always tell you the truth.”

She stops walking. “No, you tell me your truth.” She grits her teeth, words welling up in her throat like a burst dam, tripping over each other. It must be an awful place, sometimes, to be trapped inside his mind. To have to justify all of those awful, horrifying things that have happened to him to make him the way he is with stories about being the Devil. It makes her heart ache terribly for him. The scars flash in her mind again, from where he tried to cut off wings that didn’t exist. 

_Your dad did that to you?_

__

_No, that’s where I cut my wings off._

Chloe feels compelled to keep talking. “And I know that all of these metaphors, they’re real for you. But I think humoring them has just encouraged you, and that’s on me, but…” she sighs. Lucifer finally stops walking and turns to face her, his expression wide-eyed and cautious. “But I’m done.”

Hurt flares in Lucifer’s fathomless black eyes. “Detective…”

It’s amazing how he can fill such a small word with so much feeling. Chloe raises her hands in a peace keeping gesture. “No more metaphors,” she pleads quietly, closing the distance between them. “No more Devil talk. I told you before that you may think that that’s what you are, but I don’t see you that way.” 

Pain is superseded by confusion in his eyes, as if it is utterly confounding to him that anyone could ever see him as anything but the embodiment of pure evil, and her heart throbs again.

He’s not evil. Just damaged.

Then, in a very quiet voice, he says, “Lately, I’m not sure I do either.” Something like a smile inches across a face, tremulous and unsure. 

Joy swells in Chloe’s stomach, and she wants to tell him how happy that makes her, to see him not drowning in misery and self-hatred for a moment. 

But they don’t have time. They have a job to do. She nods. “Great, well. First things first.” Her hand drifts to her service weapon on habit. Once they deal with this, her and Lucifer will be able to talk about all this, all the things that have been going on with him, with them. Maybe she’ll finally, finally get him to confront his issues and begin to work through all his trauma. She hopes that after this mess with Marcus, Lucifer will finally stop seeing himself as the Devil and start seeing himself as the man that she knows him to be.

“Right. Come on.” He starts walking, and she follows. Barring everything else, there is no one she would rather have at her side in this moment than Lucifer. No one she trusts more to have her back. 

They take the elevator up to the seventh floor in a silence. Some of the tension has left Lucifer’s shoulders, she notes, as she studies him out of the corner of her eye. For a moment, she wonders if it was weighing on him, the knowledge that Marcus was the Sinnerman- he didn’t do anything about it, why hadn’t he done anything about it?- but before she can think of a way to phrase the question so it doesn’t sound like she’s accusing him, the bell dings and the doors open.

“After you, Detective.”

She nods to herself and steps out into an ornate hallway lined with packing crates, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention. “Hello? Kelsey, are you here?” Chloe calls out as she and Lucifer pick their way down the hallway. “Your brother sent us.” 

They enter a wide, circular room packed with antiques. She scans the room, unease coursing through her she turns in place. This is a place for storage and transportation. No one lives here, that much is obvious. “Something doesn’t feel right,” she mutters, and reaches for her gun.

“I wouldn’t do that, Chloe.”

_Marcus._

To her right, she sees Lucifer whip his head around so quickly that the motion blurs, and the little part of her that isn’t focused on the sudden presence of her ex-fiancé, Charlotte’s murderer, freaks a little at the uncanniness of it. But she doesn’t have time to worry about Lucifer being weird right now. Cautiously, she releases her gun and raises her hands in the air as she hears a safety click off. There is a rattle overhead on the balcony circling the room as three men show themselves, aiming guns where she and Lucifer stand.

Shit. 

A trap. Of course, it’s a trap. Pierce wouldn’t be the mastermind he is if he wasn’t good at evading the police. It’s a trap, and she walked right into. She led Lucifer, a civilian, her friend, right into it. She finds herself reaching out her left hand in front of Lucifer, as if that could somehow protect him, somehow stop the bullets from hitting him if Pierce’s men decide to cut to the chase and just shoot them. 

Pierce and another armed thug stand in front of her and Lucifer, all smug confidence She scans the men on the balcony again. Semiautomatics, all three. Her heart thunders in her ears. If she can’t deescalate the situation now, there is about to be a serious problem. “You don’t have to do this, Pierce.”

“Yes, I do.” His voice is cold, glacial, and thrumming with something that almost sounds like… excitement. “Normally, I would just skip town and reinvent myself, but this time I can’t.” He moves his arms from where they had been hidden behind his back, revealing the silver Glock in his hands. He cocks it and takes a step forward. “Not before I kill Lucifer.”

The bottom drops out of Chloe’s stomach, and every muscle in her body constricts. When she speaks, she tries her absolute hardest not show her fear. “What? Why?” She decides then that no matter the cost, Lucifer has been hurt enough in his life. She won’t let anything else happen to him. She isn’t going to let him die here because of some megalomaniac psychopath decided to go on a murder spree. 

Above all else, it is her duty as a police officer to protect innocent people from dangerous criminals like the Sinnerman. 

Pierce grins. It’s terrifying. “Because I know that he’ll never stop hunting me.”

How could she have allowed herself to think that she loved him, even for a second? Stupid. Chloe glances at Lucifer over her shoulder, and steels herself. 

“And I can’t afford to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder. But you don’t have to die, Chloe.” He aims the Glock at Lucifer’s head. “Step away from him.”

“Detective, for once I agree with this imbecile.” Lucifer’s voice is low and dangerous. “Step aside.”

She can’t let Lucifer get hurt. No matter the cost. She can’t let Pierce kill him. Her heartbeat is so loud in her ears that she can barely think, and she sinks into her crisis training. It’s harder somehow, when it’s her ex-finance who’s pointing the gun at someone she loves. Without a conscious decision to move, she finds herself stepping in front of Lucifer, into the path of the Pierce’s gun. 

Can’t let Lucifer get hurt. Lucifer, her strange, manic partner who thinks he’s bullet proof, who’s tackled knife-wielding assailants for her, who thinks the whole world is out to get him. “No.”

“Detective!” Lucifer cries out, and it chills her, hearing the sudden, unfamiliar thread of fear coloring his voice. 

“Chloe,” Peirce snaps in warning. 

It dawns on her then, truly, that she absolutely chose wrong between the two of them. How could she have been so blind? How could she have let Pierce draw her in with his lies? Lucifer has always been his strange, unwieldy self, complete and without artifice, and she wants that, regrets not seeing earlier how much it means to her. 

Piece squeezes the gun but doesn’t lower it. 

“I believed everything you said, Marcus. That you loved me. That you did all of this for me.” Chloe tries to appeal to his emotional side in one last ditch effort to save them, hoping against all hope that maybe there is some kind of residual affection there, something left that she can wheedle out of him. “Which is why I know that you won’t shoot.”

He hesitates, then lets the barrel droop downwards. “You made me realize that life is worth living,” Pierce says, and she lets herself hope, for just a moment, that she and Lucifer might be able to walk away from this unscathed. “And I will do anything to stay alive.” He raises the gun again, his face growing cold. “And if you get in the way of that…” the rest of the threat hangs unspoken in the air between them. 

Chloe raises her hands. Dread pools in her stomach like an iron weight. “Okay. I believe you.” She sucks in a deep breath, every cell in her body aware of Lucifer’s lanky form hovering inches behind her, preternaturally quiet. 

She has to keep Lucifer safe.

She has to end it.

“I believe you,” she says again, and the coldness in Pierce’s eyes tells everything she needs to know about what is about to happen. 

There is no getting out of here unharmed. 

Had Charlotte seen that look, before she died?

“I don’t want to die,” she whispers, and for a moment, she remembers another day, another life, another bullet, with Lucifer hanging over her calling her name, his hands red with her blood. “And I can’t. Not without stopping you.” Not without keeping Lucifer safe. Not before avenging Charlotte and stopping Pierce from being able to go after Dan and Ella. 

She reaches for her gun, draws it, squeezes off one shot without aiming, feels the recoil race up her arm. 

She sees Peirce spin as her bullet clips his side, and sees the muzzle fire as his henchman shoots. 

And she feels the chest-shattering impact as his shot hits her and knocks her staggering back into Lucifer’s arms as he screams, “Detective!”

Blackness claws at her vision, and she gets the sense that she’s fallen down, but she can’t see, can’t speak. One of her ribs is cracked, she’s pretty sure, maybe two, and it’s all she can do to stay consciousness, to fight at the darkness trying to pull her under as the pain swarms over her like a pack of ravenous rats. 

“No, no, this can’t happen.”

I’m okay, she wants to tell him, but she can’t get her breath back, can’t see past the black fuzzy shapes occluding her vision, can’t move for the paralyzing pain radiating through her torso like she swallowed a ball of molten lead.

“Finish him! Finish it!” she hears someone yell through the ringing in her ears, and it sounds like she’s hearing him from underwater. 

Lucifer screams, an agonized, wordless cry that sounds like it’s tearing its way out of his throat. Gunfire fills the space around them, and Chloe is just cognizant enough to feel confused when she isn’t shredded apart by a hail of bullets.

Around her, over her, Lucifer cries out again, pants out a whimpered scream of distress, and she feels him clutch at her, press his warm hand to the side of her face as he cradles her against his body, and her fear comes back in bounds. 

She wills herself to reanimate, to push through the pain, to do something, anything at all to help, save him, stop that terrible haunting scream coming from him.

There’s a break in the gunfire, and Chloe has the very disorienting sensation of being flipped upside down and inside out and tossed around like a sock in a tumble dryer, but then just as suddenly it stops. 

The abrupt change in air pressure and motion brings her back to herself. 

There is silence, and then she feels Lucifer’s hand brush gently over the bullet hole in her flak jacket. She reaches up to cup it, pulls the shirt down to show him that she’s okay, or as okay as she can be in this scenario. That she’s not bleeding out, at least. 

She looks up at him, and for a moment, Lucifer really does look like an angel, haloed by sun, eyes shining. Beautiful. 

The sun?

She was only out for a moment. How did he get them outside? How did he get them away at all? “What happened?” Her voice comes out a weak rasp.

“You’re safe,” Lucifer says, and she doesn’t think that she’s ever seen him look like this, so openly relieved and so openly afraid. His face is drawn, like he’s in terrible pain but trying to hide it.  
“That’s all that matters.” He’s cradling her in his arms, she realizes, holding her as close as he seems able.

He’s shaking, just a little. The barest hint of a tremor racing through his arms and torso like he’s cold. Or in shock. Did he get shot? There was a lot of bullets flying around just now, and Pierce-

Chloe chokes on her own spit for a second, then manages, “We need to find Pierce.” She sits up, wincing as the bones in her chest grind together- yep, something is definitely hurt bad, deep inside- and feels Lucifer’s warmth vanish from her back. She hears a sharp flap, like someone shaking out a bedsheet, and glances back over her shoulder, only to find Lucifer gone. 

She’s alone on the building roof, somehow. 

She rolls her shoulders, and winces as her ribs grind together. How the hell did he get them up here? It was like he-

It was like he flew.

But that’s ridiculous. 

He’s not a fallen angel. Chloe knows that. He’s just sick. He thinks he’s the Devil because he was hurt and abused, not because he’s- he’s. He’s just Lucifer. Her partner. 

A mentally ill man who somehow shielded her from hundreds of bullets and brought her up ten floors in the blink of an eye.

Who maybe just went back down to finish what they started.

Fuck.

She can’t think about this now. She needs to get him, and they need to get the fuck out of here. Chloe clambers to her feet and staggers towards the stairs. Her phone trills at her, but she can’t answer it, can’t think of anything other than getting to Lucifer and stopping him before he gets himself killed. 

There is a scattering of white bloody feathers strewn across the roof, and she sees them, and refuses to acknowledge what they are, what they might be. She can’t think about that right now, she just can’t.

As she enters the stairwell, she hears gunshots, one after another in rapid succession, and sucks down her terror, throwing all her energy into moving her body as quickly as physically possible. 

She can’t let him die.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do if he dies. She can’t face the thought. He’s become so tangled up in her life that it would be like removing a vital internal organ without anesthesia. She flings herself down the stairwell with reckless abandon, slamming her hip against railing as she spills out into the concourse above the gallery. 

Below, she hears Lucifer laugh, wild and manic, and the thud of a body hitting a hard surface. 

Chloe’s chest aches as she sprints down the last leg of the stairs, whipping around, and her foot skids on broken glass scattered across the lading like frozen rain. She almost loses her footing, coming to her knee, and feels the glass bite through her jeans and into the skin underneath. 

“I promised you that I would find a way to kill you,” she hears Lucifer snarl.

Chloe looks up, scrambling to her feet, and the motion draws Lucifer’s attention away from where he and Pierce are grappling over something. 

His face goes slack for a heartbeat at the sight of her, and that’s all it takes. 

He begins to form her name with his lips, and then Pierce moves, knocks his arm away, and drives a blade into Lucifer’s abdomen with a sick, wet crunch.

“Lucifer!” She bounds down the last of the steps, thinking only of getting to him, catching him before he can collapse to the ground. 

Pierce twists the blade, and Lucifer cries out, grabs at it with weak fingers. The sound is agony to Chloe, and she reaches in vain for her gun only to find it absent, lost amongst the carnage of the floor. Instead, she charges forwards as Pierce twists the knife again, then rips it out of Lucifer. 

Chloe slams into Pierce and shoves him as hard as she can. The push sends him staggering a few steps away, his feet sliding over the bloody feathers and shell casings littering the floor. Chloe steps back, planting herself between Pierce and Lucifer and gropes for Lucifer’s shoulder. “Get the fuck away from him.”

Lucifer looks down at his hands, confusion and pain twisting his face as blood begins to pour out of him like a shattered bottle, and he collapses to his knees. 

Peirce snorts and twirls the knife around his pointer finger. Lucifer’s blood sprays off of it like a fan, and it’s then that Chloe realizes that it’s one of Maze’s curved claw-like knives. 

What the fuck?

She feels a hand pawing weakly at the back of her shirt, and turns away from Pierce, panic making her breath come in short little bursts, everything but the man in front of her vanishing from her thoughts. “Lucifer?” 

Blood is pouring from the wound at an alarming rate, the white of his shirt surrendering to the tide of red even as she watches and she can see the pain of it welling up, threatening to drown him. Without immediate medical attention, it’s a mortal wound. With a terse grunt, Lucifer slumps, sprawling on his side, his shaking hands clutching weakly at the wound. Oddly, she notices, there are a handful of bullet holes in his shirt, but no wounds, no blood, just ragged little punctures, but she doesn’t have time to worry about that. 

“Lucifer!” Chloe drops to her knees, hands hovering over him, trying to split her attention between Pierce and stopping the bleeding. She presses one hand to Lucifer’s stomach, the other coming to rest on his hip, and it says dire things about the state of his well-being that he doesn’t even make a joke about her feeling him up. “You’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be okay.” Blood pulses out between her fingers, dripping over her, coating her forearm. Panic threatens to overwhelm her, and she forces it down. 

She has to focus, or Lucifer is going to die.

She presses hard, and he gasps. His hand comes up and wraps around her wrist. His grip is feeble, and his gaze is loose and unfocused. “Detective?”

There is the sound of feet kicking shell casing as someone runs towards them from down the hall, but the only thing she can see is Lucifer bleeding out in front of her.

“I got it, boss!”

His skin is waxy, and his fingers loosen their grip on her wrist.

“Do it.”

She needs to get him to a hospital _now_.

Then something connects with the side of Chloe’s head and sends her sprawling as stars flash in her vision like fireworks. 

Lucifer cries out, and Chloe rolls woozily onto her side just in time to see Pierce straddle Lucifer and wrench his head to the side so that his face is turned towards Chloe. His dark eyes widen as Pierce jams a syringe into the side of his neck and pushes down on the plunger. 

Lucifer grunts. His face goes slack and his eyes roll back into his head. His eyelashes flutter wildly in agitation, like even drugged into unconsciousness he’s still in pain. The tiny tics of movement are the only sign that he isn’t dead. 

He’s still bleeding. 

Chloe scrambles to her hands and knees. Her ribs grind together, and everything is pulsing red around the edges. She just has time to say, “Marcus-“ when his fist collides with the side of her face, knocking her back into the floor. 

The world tilts in lazy circles around her, and she fights to stay conscious. She can’t pass out, she needs to stay awake to protect Lucifer.

Chloe feels someone haul her over a shoulder with little gentleness, and grunts as the air is forced out of her lungs. Something in her chest snaps. The pain blinds her, curls around her nerve endings like fire, smothering every sense, every chance she has to fight back. Pierce is talking to someone, barking orders at them, but Chloe’s ears are ringing too loudly for her to really understand anything. 

Her vision is hazy and black, and then the arms are gone and she’s slamming against a hard surface, and the world tilts out of focus again. The fire of agony rolls through in her waves, and she groans, low and guttural. 

This is bad.

So very bad.

They’re going to die.

Chloe comes back to herself with a harsh cough, panic threatening to choke her. Everything is swaying, and for a moment she thinks she’s still just woozy, but then she blinks again, and realizes that no, everything is moving, shaking back and forth like there’s an earthquake. The floor rumbles under her. A truck. She’s in the back of a box truck. 

“Fuck,” she sputters. The inhalation causes another wave of fire to roll through her chest, and she keeps her breaths faint and shallow after that. 

Her hands are cuffed to a metal railing on the wall, and in the dim light, she can just make out a few packing crates filling the space around her. Chloe squints in the darkness, trying to see if she can make out any identifying details that will help her figure out where Pierce is taking them-

Her stomach lurches.

Lucifer. Where is he?

She blinks again, her eyes gritty, and scans the floor around her, wriggling so she’s more upright and less of her weight is pulling on the handcuffs pinning her wrists to the wall. The adrenaline is helping her focus, letting her ignore the litany of bodily injures on her face and chest and knee. She can already feel her wrists beginning to bruise, and the movement sends waves of pain crunching in her chest and neck. 

Chloe is unable to bite down on the little whimper of agony that nearly knocks her breathless. Near her, she thinks she hears something move, triggered by her noise of distress, perhaps. She freezes. Pierce’s men? Or Lucifer? She doesn’t know. She’s scared to know. 

The memory of Lucifer lying under her hands, hemorrhaging blood onto the white tile floor hits her in the gut like a sledgehammer. One of the big ones, made to break solid rock. It steals her meager breath and threatens to choke her. 

A sob surges up in Chloe’s chest, and she pulls her knees up, curling in on herself. How can Lucifer survive this? Pierce made it perfectly clear that he had every intention of killing Lucifer, and a knife to the gut will do that just as well as a bullet between the eyes. Slower, but just as sure. 

Wherever they’re going, Chloe doesn’t think Lucifer is coming with them. 

Not alive anyway. 

The thought that his body might be tucked here in the dark with her sends another sob roiling in her chest, and it escapes between her clenched teeth with a rusty squeak. The handcuffs around her wrists burn under the strain of her squirming. 

There are plenty of places to hide a body outside the city limits of Los Angeles. It is an oasis in the middle of a desert and a mountain range and an ocean. The choices are endless. Peirce is a homicide detective and a crime boss. He knows how to get rid of a pair of corpses. 

But…

Why is Chloe still alive?

It would have been easier if Pierce had just shot her in the head at the loft. Is he… is he keeping her alive? Chloe can’t fathom why. He made it clear when he had his little minion shoot her that he doesn’t give a shit if she lives or dies. Well, he probably does. He probably prefers her dead. One less loose end to keep track off. A shudder of revulsion rolls down her spine. She almost married him, despite Lucifer warning her, in his own mentally off-kilter way, that he was a monster. 

Chloe can’t think about that now. She has to focus on surviving this, against all odds. On getting Lucifer, if he’s somehow still alive, and getting away from Pierce and his henchmen. And if he isn’t, then she needs to know, needs to tuck it away so she can fall apart later, when she’s safe. 

Carefully, Chloe squishes her emotions down, deep down, and focuses on the task at hand. She can’t think about Lucifer, limp and white and cold and dead- 

_Focus._

She’s a police officer. She’s had crisis training. She knows that information is her best friend here. She needs to figure out where they’re taking her, if she can, and if she can manage to escape. She needs to signal for help, if anyone is around. 

Chloe hadn’t realized before, in the throes of panic, but the truck is hot. There’s no AC back here, or if there is, they haven’t bothered to turn it on. Sweat is pooling along her hairline, soaking the small of her back under her flak jacket. She’s dizzy, and her throat feels gummy, and she doesn’t think that it’s just from the movement of the vehicle. She’s already dehydrated, and it’s compounding with a lack of sleep that’s fogging her brain over like a humid windshield, making it hard to focus on anything other than her physical discomfort and the fact that her best friend might be dying, or dead, a few feet away from her in the dark.

The truck makes a sharp right turn that slams the back of Chloe’s head into the wall and sends her skidding so she’s back to being slumped on the floor with her arms suspended painfully over her head. Whatever road they’ve turned down must be bumpy as hell because the floor bounces hard enough to register on a seismograph, and Chloe can’t get herself upright. Every bounce knocks another body part against the wall or the floor, and after a while, she gives up and goes limp. It helps. Sort of. 

Finally, the movement stops.

Chloe scrambles into a crouch, unsteady on bruised, numb legs, her chest aching, but ready to thrash and kick and leave a mark on whoever is about to come and drag her out of here. 

There is the sound of footsteps outside, and she tries to follow the motion with her ears. Muted voices call back and forth, and someone laughs. A door slams, and then silence, a long, percolating silence that seems to stretch for years and years. 

Chloe’s heart is beating so fast she almost can’t hear anything else. The adrenaline squirting into her blood is making her extremities shaky, and she wishes they would just get on with it already. The anticipation is its own special kind of torture. If she knew what they were planning, then she could make an escape plan of some kind, but she doesn’t, and she really hasn’t got much to work with. 

The truck doors swing open without warning, and bright sunlight blinds her. Chloe flinches and squints against the light. The floor shudders as someone hops up, and she barely has time to brace herself before a booted foot connects with her knee, sending her sprawling on her side. The cuffs bite into her wrists, hard enough to draw blood. 

Rough hands fumble around her forearms, and Chloe feels the cuffs give way. Before she can lash out and scramble away, the hands drag her upright and yank her out into the sun, hurling her onto the ground.

She eats dirt, hard. Rough sand skins her left arm from wrist to elbow, and her chin scraps along a jagged hunk of quartz jutting out of the ground. It stuns her, knocks the wind out of her already injured chest. The heat blasts her like she’s laying on a stovetop, and it’s all she can do to wriggle on the ground like a worm, trying to breathe. 

“Careful! We need her alive.”

“She’s fine.” The man who had thrown her from the truck hops down in the dirt beside her and wrenches her head back by the hair. “See? Still alive.”

Chloe is too woozy to do more than groan. 

The man drags her to her feet and swings her around so her back is pressed to his chest. The light is still blinding. It’s like they’re standing on the surface of the sun, but she squints against it, and can see at least a little. “Now, we’re gonna walk this way. If you don’t, my friend here is gonna shoot you. Okay? Great.”

The man’s arms are bands of steal around her chest and midsection. Chloe’s arms are pinned to her sides, and it’s all she can do to keep to her feet as he forces her to walk forwards in an awkward, shuffling step. The other man is thin and reedy with a shaved head, but what he lacks in obvious brute strength he makes up for in the semiauto rifle clutched in his hands. It’s aimed at the ground, but on a good day Chloe would have to be very lucky to wrestle a gun away from a perp without being shot, and today is the furthest thing possible from a good day. 

They round the corner of the box truck, and Chloe chokes down on a wave of dread. There’s nothing around them other than a single, ramshackle looking cinderblock house that’s the same dry beige as the miles and miles of desert that she can see stretching out in every direction. 

Desert it is, then. 

Fuck.

She twists her head, trying to see more, see if she can gather some sort of landmark to tell her where they are, but the man holding her doesn’t seem to like that. He turns and slams her against the side of the truck, smacking her face up to a mural of Hawaii that’s sun faded and peeling. “None of that.” A U-Haul. They took her in a U-Haul. That’s good- if it’s stolen the LAPD might be able to track the locator and send someone to retrieve it. 

Chloe squirms, trying to breath, and after a few seconds, the man lets up and continues dragging her along to towards the house. She thinks he’s going to bring her inside, but instead they round the truck and she gets a glimpse of an old blue pick-up truck parked haphazardly a few yards away.  
Peirce hops out of the passenger seat, and a bald man climbs out of the driver’s seat. Peirce favors his left side as he stomps towards Chloe, his feet kicking up little clouds of dust. The minion holding Chloe shoves her forwards and she stumbles to her knees in the dirt with a gasp. She’s about to lunge forwards and see if she can make a grab for Pierce’s nuts when she feels the barrel of the semiauto press against the back of her head, and freezes on instinct. 

Pierce smiles at her in a gesture that’s oddly absent of malice, and nods to Chloe’s tormenter. The big man walks to the pickup truck with its driver and together they drag something out of the back, but from this angle, Chloe can’t see what it is. Nothing good probably. Shovels, maybe, to bury her body when this is over. She focuses instead on Pierce, who stands a few feet from her, his arms crossed in front of him in a pose screaming casual relaxation, but she can see tension across his shoulders, in the muscle twitching the corner of his mouth into a scowl. 

She raises a hand, ready to throw herself at Pierce’s mercy and play damsel in distress if it means she’ll get a clean shot at him, but before she can even open her mouth, the gun barrel presses harder into her scalp, and the reedy man snarls, “Shut up, cop bitch.”

Chloe nods, just enough to show her compliance and slowly lowers her arm. The movement sends a lightning bolt of pain racing through the left side of her ribcage.

“It’s unfortunate, Decker,” Piece says, shaking his head. “I actually kind of liked you, and it really isn’t your fault, you know, this whole celestial tug of war over you.”

Chloe blinks, and her dumfoundedness must show on her face, because Pierce laughs and beckons his minions forward around the truck. “Oh, that’s right. The sensible Chloe Decker doesn’t believe in the Devil.”

The minions step around the truck, dragging a body by the ankles, and it takes Chloe’s harried brain several seconds for her to realize that it’s Lucifer. He’s pale and covered in dust, but his eyes are open, and the bleeding on his stomach looks like it’s begun to slow, at least. Chloe twitches, like her body wants to run to him even though her mind knows she has a gun to the head. She is rewarded for her lack of compliance with a sharp tap to the back of the skull with said gun. 

Lucifer looks woozy and confused, but… better, somehow. Like a little color has come back to his face. He shifts in the dirt, little tremulous movements that have no power behind them, but its movement nonetheless. 

“Now,” Pierce says in a cloying tone. “I think it’s time for a little show and tell.” He leans down flips Lucifer onto his stomach in the dirt, and plants one booted foot on the small of his back, pinning him in place. One henchman traps both of Lucifer’s wrists under his feet, and the other stands back and aims a pistol at him. They give Chloe a good view of her partner’s lithe body spread out on the ground underneath them, writhing in the dust, and she is unable to quell a whimper of fear of what on earth show and tell could possibly mean.

Pierce leans over and grabs Lucifer’s hair, uses it to wrench his head back so he is forced to look up at Chloe. “So, here’s what’s gonna happen. You have until the count of three to show your wings, and if you don’t, I’m gonna shoot Decker in the head.”

Chloe’s blood turns to ice in her veins, and Lucifer’s gaze finally sharpens up enough to convey emotion. In his fathomless dark eyes, she can see her same helpless terror reflected back at her.  
“Detective,” he rasps, and the word cuts off in a ragged groan as Pierce grinds his heel into Lucifer’s spine. 

“One.”

Lucifer whimpers and his face slumps forwards into the dirt, eyelashes fluttering like it’s all he can do to stay conscious. And what can he do? Pierce is taunting Lucifer with his delusions of being a fallen angel, toying with him before he forces Lucifer to watch Chloe die, that’s what this game is. 

“Two.”

The barrel is hot against the back of her head, and Chloe is suddenly certain that she’s about to die without ever telling Lucifer how much she cares about him, without seeing Trixie again, without hugging Ella again, or Dan, or even Maze. 

Lucifer cries out, and there is a terrible sound of air displacing and fabric tearing and wood breaking, and he twitches violently as the ground on either side of him is replaced in a carpet of red and white.  
He yelps, and so does Pierce, but all Chloe can do is choke on her shock as wings extend from Lucifer’s back, flapping violently through the air, scattering broken feathers the color of moonlight across the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

Lucifer has wings.

He has _wings_. 

Chloe’s hindbrain skitters in panic around her skull as she tries to make sense of what she’s seeing, of the huge field of white and scarlet that moves like it’s alive, because it is alive, it’s part of him, and oh god it’s real, _it’s all real_. Chloe’s eyes are melting at the sight of them, at the raw power and light that hums below them, like they’re radioactive, beautiful and otherworldly and… 

And broken. The top ridge of the right wing is bent down and covered in blood. In fact, both wings are speckled with gore and broken feathers, little rivulets of blood running down the glossy feathers like- like he’d been shot. Puzzle pieces Chloe hadn’t even realized she’s been holding onto begin to slot together, and she chokes. The roof. The bloody feathers. They came from him, from Lucifer, because he’s-

His face is twisted in soundless agony as the wings flap weakly through the sunbaked desert air, and Chloe realizes the price he paid to keep her safe from Pierce’s bullets, because she’s a cop and she’s been shot and she knows gunshot wounds, and those dozens and dozens of bleeding puckers on the wings are souvenirs from a thousand blazing kisses of lead. 

Piece laughs like a maniac, and reverently reaches down, caresses one of the wings. Broken feathers hang off the thing like it went through a paper shredder, and Lucifer’s whole body shudders at the contact. 

Chloe sees a ripple of pain and something akin to fear twist over his expression. The wing flaps weakly like he’s trying to propel himself away, but Pierce makes a grab for it and latches on, his muscular frame overpowering Lucifer’s slimmer, injured one with ease. Chloe cries out in horror as he digs in, yanking the wing back so it’s almost perpendicular to Lucifer’s back. Pierce plants his feet and yanks, twisting the wing around and around until, with a nauseating popping sound, it goes limp. 

Lucifer screams. 

The sound digs into Chloe like a knife, twisting around and around, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Never in her life has she heard a sound so full of complete and utter agony, and it tears at her, scrapes the inside of her skin like broken glass. 

The gun barrel pressed to her scalp droops so its pointing at her shoulder, and she acts without thinking, jerking her head back so it slams into the reedy man’s face, and lunges forwards. She doesn’t even get to her feet before the man is grabbing her by the hair. He tackles her into the dirt, his knees making crushing contact with her back as her chin slams into the dirt. 

It feels like an eternity, but in reality, only a handful of seconds have gone by since the wings have appeared. 

Chloe’s whole world has gone decidedly pear-shaped, and she can only stare at the wings as she struggles, at the how unnaturally they fill the space around Lucifer as the tiny part of her mind that isn’t screaming with static repeats _it’s real, it’s all real, he isn’t crazy_ over and over again as she tries in vain to get free so she can clobber Pierce. 

Lucifer twitches, scrambles weakly at the ground with his feet like he’s trying to crawl away, gasping sobs spooling out of him with the blood, but Pierce has him pinned under his boot and the henchman has his hands restrained with bone-breaking pressure. 

Pierce is still laughing, like a child with a new toy that he can’t wait to break. 

Pierce reaches for the other wing as it extends outwards, and Chloe tries to shake off her attacker, desperate to get to him and stop it. “No! Get off, no!” She kicks violently, throwing everything she has at the man holding her, but he has her pinned and all she can is wriggle helplessly on the ground. 

The other wing bends in Pierce’s grasp, bends and bends, pulling Lucifer’s spine up in an arch with it, and then it comes out with a sharp pop.

Lucifer makes a sound like he’s choking, and his eyes roll wildly in his skull as Pierce lets go of the wing. It falls to Lucifer’s side, limp and lifeless. He flops weakly under Pierce’s foot, and the way he’s moving attests to the violence of having two major limbs ripped out of place. Like something vital has been damaged and it’s all he can do to not black out.

At some unseen signal from Pierce, the henchman releases Lucifer’s hands. He poses little threat to them now, that much is very clear. The way he’s twitching like a crushed bug on the ground is making Chloe nauseous. 

The bald henchman keeps his gun trained on Lucifer anyway, and the other one walks over to Chloe and drags her upright. She thrashes wildly between the two of them and manages to land a solid kick on the thigh of the taller one. 

He grunts, then backhands her across the face, hard. The shock of it knocks the breath out of Chloe’s lungs and she tastes blood. The blow stuns her enough for the taller henchman to wrap his arms around her middle and the smaller one to grab her legs, and together they haul her towards the little cinderblock house. 

It seems that they aren’t going to kill her, yet. 

Chloe writhes, and on instinct more than anything, screams, “Lucifer!” He won’t be able to help her, she knows that, but in the heat of the moment she isn’t able to clamp down on that little kernel of knowledge that’s grown like a weed in her heart, stubborn and strange, telling her that Lucifer always has her back, no matter what.

But not this time. 

Lucifer doesn’t move. She doesn’t think he can.

Pierce glances at her, but his attention is focused on the wings, pearlescent and bloody in the dust. Even in their ragged state, they pulse with an energy that tugs at the edges of Chloe’s senses, urging her to _look_, to drift off into their diffuse glow and lose herself. 

She fights it, closing her eyes and turning her face away, thrashing as the two men drag her into the house. The last thing she sees of the outside world is the vast expanse of blue sky wheeling overhead, pale and cloudless. 

The house smells of dust and rotting wood. It appears sound, if dirty and unused, but she doesn’t get a good look as she’s dragged through. They turn down a staircase leading into darkness that seems endless, and that’s when the panic rears up hard enough to blot out Chloe’s other senses. 

If she goes down there, her chances of coming back up dwindle to almost nothing. 

She screams, wordless and full of terror, and kicks wildly enough to free one of her legs. She throws all her weight behind it and braces it against the doorframe. “No, please, no! Let me go!” Chloe thrashes in the men’s arms like a fish on a line, trying in vain to tear her way free. Flashes of a brief future as a prisoner before she and Lucifer are murdered flicker before her eyes like scenes in an old timey projector movie. Vague notions of a longer one with a more nefarious and torturous purpose follow, and she kicks harder.

The man grabs at her foot and wrestles her ankles back into a hold. Chloe bucks against them and lets loose a shriek loud enough to rouse the dead, or so she hopes. It burns her throat on the way out, but neither of them loosens their grip. They haul her bodily down the steps into the dim basement. 

The room is lit by a tiny window in one wall, level with the ground outside. The cement floor is filthy, littered with bits of trash, and dust swirls in the air like a cloud. A rusty metal bed frame is bolted to the ground in the middle of the floor, and a horror so potent it nearly blinds her wells up in Chloe’s soul at the sight of it, at what its purpose might be. At the realization that this place has been used before and will be used again long after her bones lie bleaching in the sun. 

The men don’t bring her to the bed, instead stopping at one of the four metal support posts that make a square concentric to the walls of the basement. One of them drops her ankles and they force her arms in front her, around the post. Handcuffs rachet around each wrist in sequence, and the men step back, examining their handywork. They nod to each other and the reedy one kicks Chloe’s feet out from under her, knocking her sprawling on the dirty ground. The handcuffs dig into her already bruised wrists as she collapses. 

Then the men vanish back up the stairs, leaving Chloe alone, trapped. 

Chloe yanks at the cuffs with vigor, and they bite into the bruises on her wrists. Half-clotted blood on her forearm smears the metal red, drips onto the leg of her filthy jeans. The scrape burns, but the pain pales in comparison to the ache in her head and ribs, to the fear of what they might do to her, and to Lucifer. 

She gets her feet under her and settles into a crouch with her arms wrapped around the pole, sucking in air like she can’t get enough of it. It feels like she can’t. It feels like she’s drowning. 

Outside, there are vague noises of an argument and a car door slamming. 

She is drowning. 

The visage of the bloody wings is painted across the back of Chloe’s eyelids. Angel wings. _Lucifer’s_ wings. 

She rests her forehead against the pole and allows her eyelids to flutter shut. Every feather, every fleck of gore and grime, is vivid in her memory. A part of her, a deep primal part that perhaps contains the genetic memory of contact with angels, urges Chloe to fixate, to go limp and weak and mindless. That part longs for them, to stare and caress. That part covets. 

She shakes herself and tugs on the handcuffs. The pain centers her, helps block the memory of the wings. She can’t think of them. She can’t lose her mind like she’s seen so many of their perps do in Lucifer’s presence, not if she wants to survive. 

Chloe gives herself a few more seconds to freak out, and then tries to shove it all back down, out of the way of her ability to think critically. It’s harder now, though. The sight of the wings and what they mean have knocked her off balance and made it hard to focus, sent her reeling towards a precipice that she isn’t sure she can pull herself back from.

It’s impossible to ignore the reality of the situation. Chloe is going to die. She might be raped first, tortured by their psychopathic boss, but it’s going to end with her in a shallow grave next to Lucifer in the California desert, that she is almost certain of. 

Lucifer, the Devil.

Chloe chokes and tries to keep her breathing even. Outside, someone yells, a curse word or an order, then there is the sound of metal sliding against metal. 

Can Lucifer even die? Chloe’s seen him bleed when he got shot, when she shot him. She’s seen him drunk and high and all manner of things. 

She’s seen him _bleed_. 

If they survive this, she’s going to have a lot of questions, but she doesn’t have the emotional real estate to allot them any room at the moment. She has to get out of this room. 

Mentally, Chloe runs down a list. No gun- it was lost somewhere in the chaos of the shootout in the galley. A shootout she somehow survived, because Lucifer did something to get them out of it, and with all the feathers and bullet wounds, it isn’t hard to see what. 

She retches. Nothing comes up but a mouth full of thin bile. Now that she’s alone, the physical pain is coming back in waves, threatening to suck her under, but she can’t give into it. 

Shadows flash past the tiny basement window, throwing darkness over the walls in waves, and Chloe shrinks down. Help? Doubtful. She doesn’t want to yell in case it pisses Pierce off and he decides to come down here and… deal with her. She swallows and concentrates on slowing her frenetic breathing. It won’t do her any good to panic any more than she already has. 

The sound of a door opening upstairs catches her attention, followed by creaking floorboards and voices. There’s a thump, like something heavy being tossed on the floor, and Chloe flinches, hoping it’s not Lucifer. 

She shifts so the staircase is in view, watching sharply as a shaft of light pierces the shadows of the basement. There is a shuffling sound, and someone swears. 

Then Lucifer’s body tumbles down the stairs with a painful clatter. He’s still limp and semi-conscious, and when he hits the bottom, he doesn’t really do anything other than groan. Chloe looks away. She doesn’t want to look at him in pain, and she doesn’t trust herself to catch sight of the wings again. 

Instead she listens as several sets of footsteps thunder down after him. 

“Don’t damage him, you idiots,” Pierce snarls. He’s last in the little parade, and Chloe looks up at the sound of his voice. For a second, he sounded so normal, so much like the lieutenant, so much like her fiancé, that she’s almost convinced that she’s having some sort of breakdown and the last forty-eight hours have been a vivid and horrifying hallucination. 

The radiating star of pain over her left clavicle from where Pierce had his man shoot her says otherwise. Chloe wants to snarl something at him, but all she can muster is a weak, hopeless, whimper.

Pierce doesn’t even bother to look at her. Without being asked, two of his henchmen each grab one of Lucifer’s arms and drag him forwards. His long legs trail loose in the dust behind him, and for one horrified moment, Chloe thinks he might be dead, but no, his eyes are open, vague and unseeing, glazed over in hurt. Alive, just wounded. 

Chloe shifts away as they pass her, instinctively keeping the metal pole in between them, as if that would offer her any protection from armed thugs. 

They cast Lucifer face down on the metal bedframe. He crashes on to it with a little cry that breaks Chloe’s heart in half. The third henchman comes, and in his arms are loops and loops of thick metal chains. Without talking the three of them begin fastening Lucifer to the frame, circling chains around his wrists and ankles and waist, and around the wings, so many around the wings, holding them aloft like some freaky macabre sculpture. They cast a jagged shadow across the far wall, and for a moment, Chloe feels herself falling into their grace once again. 

They lock the chains in place, and let Pierce inspect their handy work. 

Chloe shakes herself out of a daze once again as Pierce steps back with a nod. “Alright then.”

She thinks about climbing to her feet, but it hurts to move, and… she’s scared. She’s petrified of what they might do to her. 

Pierce runs one hand along the suspended wing, stretched painfully upright like Lucifer is in flight. His face shows the same sort of glassy fascination that Chloe can feel trying to tug her under. It’s some sort of human instinct then, the desire to stare at their beauty, to want to bury oneself in it and drown in their light. 

Lucifer shies away from the touch, as much as he is able in his chains, and Chloe can see his mouth moving silently like he’s trying to talk. A visible shudder runs from the top of his head all the way to the base of his spine, and the only thing that comes out of his mouth is a rusty squeak. 

“Should I get the bag, boss?”

Pierce takes several seconds before answering, and when he does, his voice is slow and thick, like honey. “Yeah. Better safe than sorry.” 

One of the henchman scampers upstairs and is back a moment later clutching a small black bag. He spreads its contents across the floor at the foot of the bed, out of Chloe’s line of sight. She only has a moment to wonder what it holds when the man stands, holding a hypodermic needle.

“This should keep even the Devil down for a few hours,” he says gleefully. 

Pierce rolls his eyes and shrugs his shoulder like it’s bothering him. Chloe takes a small moment of pleasure out of that. At least she got one shot in before everything went to shit. 

She wonders if sleep deprivation is starting to affect her brain function. It feels like it. “What is that?” Her voice is so dry and raspy that it’s nearly unintelligible. 

No one pays her any attention. The henchman moves to Lucifer and tears his sleeve, to get at the inner crook of his elbow. He administers the drugs with practiced ease, and after a second, Lucifer is carried away on the current of whatever was in that needle. 

Chloe can only hope he can’t feel anything in that twilight. 

Blood has begun to drip from the dozens of bullet wounds in the wings, pattering against the ground like rain. 

The bald henchman pulls a large Bowie knife from his belt with a sharp grin to match, and moves towards Lucifer. Before he can do whatever it is that he’s about to do- stab Lucifer or steal his kidneys or some other thing that Chloe simply isn’t creative enough to think of- Pierce saunters over to her and leans against the pole she’s cuffed to. “Don’t look so worried, Decker. There was plenty of heroin in that needle, but nothing Lucifer hasn’t had before. I’m not trying to kill him. Yet.”

Chloe leans away from him, and hates herself for it. She can’t muster up the energy to hit him, not when she knows he can slam her head into the concrete floor without even breaking a sweat. She swallows painfully around the word _heroin_. Yes, Lucifer does drugs, she’s known that, peripherally, for ages, but _heroin?_ That was a lot, in that syringe. A lot a lot, even for a partier semi-addict like him. 

No, like the Devil, she has to correct herself. He is the Devil. Human rules don’t apply to him. 

Except… he got shot, and he bled. 

_He’s bleeding now_, sings the pitter patter of his blood on the concrete, and Chloe finds herself straining forwards, trying to make sure Lucifer is still breathing. His back is moving up and down, just barely, and his eyelashes are fluttering weakly over half closed eyes. Alive, but far from present or okay. 

The man with the knife begins cutting Lucifer’s clothing off of him. In rough jagged movements, he slices off Lucifer’s suit jacket and white shirt that’s soaked through with red, crusting over to a rust at the edges, and tosses them aside. He slices up the legs up his pants and tears those away too, until Lucifer is naked, chained down to the bed frame, vulnerable and semi-conscious. 

His clothes were already bloody and ruined and run through with bullet holes, but that suit was probably worth as much as her car. The thought is so odd and out of place it almost makes Chloe laugh, and that’s when she knows that she’s starting to lose her grip on reality, for real this time. 

They come for her next. Beckoned by some gesture from Pierce, two of them walk towards her and Chloe realizes with a slowly dawning horror what’s about to happen. “No-“ she tries to scramble backwards out of their reach, but there isn’t anywhere to go. 

Pierce knocks her over with his leg, and that’s all the other two need. They pin her down and begin stripping her with brutal efficiency. Off come her boots and her jeans, going into the pile with the pieces of Lucifer’s bloody, ruined suit. The one with the knife seems to relish in her panic as he cuts away her jacket and shirt and unbuckles the vest underneath. 

“Don’t need that anymore, do you?” he cackles. 

Chloe shrinks away from him and manages to twist out of his grip. They leave her in her bra and underwear, and she doesn’t know if that’s Pierce being kind or if this is just another layer of psychological torture that he’s saving for later. She’s already been kidnapped after being shot and having her best friend almost killed in front of her. She isn’t sure how much depth of depravity they have left to explore.

They gather up the ruined clothes and leave her and Lucifer alone in the basement. Pierce lingers at the base of the stairs, and finally turns his attention from the wings to Chloe. He studies her with cold eyes that somehow make Chloe feel more naked than having her skin bared to him. A shudder spider-walks up her back as Pierce smiles at her in an expression completely devoid of warmth. “You really don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, Decker.” It’s cruel and meant to needle. Without another word, Pierce vanishes too.

Chloe slumps over so she is curled up on the dirty ground and lets out a shuddering breath that burns like fire. Her chest is aching so badly she almost can’t breathe. The scrapes on her arm and chin and wrists sting with renewed intensity, and the map of bruises purpling her flesh make it hard to focus on anything other than the pain. It’s been almost two days since she’s slept, and she can’t keep her mind from slipping. 

She can’t. 

It’s easier just to give in and slide away from conscious thought, so Chloe curls into a little ball, and shakes. 

Around her, the light slowly dims, the sunset painting the block of light from the window gold, then red, then violet, and then finally black. The world becomes a slate of shadow on shadow, the only light diffused through the dusty air by the wings extending from Lucifer’s back. Even painted with blood, the light isn’t contained, not fully. Chloe’s eyes keep drifting to them whenever she opens them, like a magnet. It’s soothing in a deeply primal way, that gentle glow; like a night light, keeping nightmarish darkness away. She doesn’t let herself think about why, as she floats. Too big. The problem is too big for her teeny human brain to handle. 

The base of the wing moves, and her attention is drawn to the way Lucifer’s skin bulges unnaturally where the feathers meet flesh, and Chloe is struck, for a moment, by how jarring it is, seeing those two things come together. From her angle, she can see under the wing, where it connects to a bulge below his shoulder blade, like there is another bone in there that isn’t present on the human skeleton. It looks… wrong, still, like the time that Dan dislocated his shoulder and the bone was pushing up against his skin all pointy and freaky. 

Lucifer twitches, and the wing moves again, and Chloe is slammed back into herself, into the situation, into clarity, because that’s exactly what it is. Pierce yanked the wings right out of their… their socket, or wherever they sit on Lucifer’s back. It floods back, threatening to drown her, but she is determined to keep her head above it. She has to keep herself together. 

Lucifer is the Devil. The actual, Biblical Devil, fallen angel, Father of Sin, Prince of Lies-

A manic laugh builds in Chloe’s throat, and bursts, violent and angry. Lucifer isn’t crazy at all. He really is the Devil. 

Chloe thought she knew fear. She’s been shot on the job and almost died. Trixie has been abducted by a crazy murderous cop. She’s almost died again after being poisoned. But none of those things quite measure up to the bone-rattling intensity of the terror spinning through her at the sight of the Devil laid out before her on his belly. Now that the initial shock has passes, she’s starting to realize what it all _means._

Chloe falls still on instinct, huddled against the pole with her knees drawn to her chest, watching the Devil with the wide eyes of a prey animal who has spotted a predator and hopes her stillness will keep her unnoticed. Does she even know him? Has everything between them been a lie, some game, some terrible trick to- to- she doesn’t know, can’t even begin to imagine what he could want with her. Every time that Lucifer has insisted that he’s immortal runs through her mind at the speed of light, every time he’s done something impossible or strange that she couldn’t explain, and every time that she had dismissed them for mere delusions and tricks. Oh, how wrong she was. 

Only…

Only, he’s not immortal, is he? He’s wounded. Chloe watches as another drop of blood, illuminated a bizarre luminescent scarlet from the light of the feathers, beads across one of the bullet wounds and drops into the darkness of the floor. 

How is the Devil bleeding? 

A memory from early in their relationship swims to the forefront of her mind, of him standing in a warehouse, insisting that she shoot him. Of him bleeding. Of the surprise on his face when he actually got hurt. Of how she had thought _Okay this is why, he’s just delusional, that explains it, that explains everything._

Chloe watches him, wary and lost in thought, and jerks sharply when she realizes that he’s watching her back. She can just see the gleam of his eyes in the darkness, half open and glassy, but she can feel his gaze on her like a physical weight. She fights the urge to cringe away and try to hide. She will not cower before him. She won’t. 

Lucifer moans a whispery, scratchy half-word lost amongst his gasping breathing, but Chloe can sense the ocean of pain behind it. It tugs at her, and that makes her angry. Is Lucifer just playing possum? She doesn’t know, and that terrifies her. 

Upstairs, a door slams, followed by the sound of muted footsteps. Chloe tries to track them so she can figure out how many people are in the house, but the sounds are too quiet and mixed together and her ears are still ringing a little from the gunshots at the loft. 

Lucifer groans again, this time a much closer approximation of a word, a garbled tangle of syllables that almost sounds like her name. Chloe snaps her head around to look at him, and this time, his vision is much clearer. She can see fear in him, genuine fear, and it stills the racing thoughts clouding her mind. His tone is pleading as he whimpers at her again. 

Another door slams upstairs, and then the one at the top of the basement opens. 

Chloe’s heart hammers at the inside of her chest like jackhammer, and she claws her way to her feet, ready to scream and kick, to do whatever she has to to keep them away from her. 

Lucifer whimpers again, and strains against his chains. The metal creaks like it’s about to snap, and Chloe wonders absently if it is, if he can shred it apart like tissue paper, or if he’s too hurt. 

Two pairs of footsteps thump down the stairs. There is a click, and harsh florescent light fills the space, blinding her. Chloe squints, blinking rapidly, trying to clear the fuzzy purple shapes dancing in her vision.

“That’s weird,” a low male voice says. One of Pierce’s men, the bald one she thinks.

“What?” 

“Well, shouldn’t it be better by now? It’s still bleeding.”

Someone sniffs disdainfully, and there is a long pause, the sounds of shuffling, a deep sigh. Chloe finally manages to strain against the light and open her eyes enough to see two men examining Lucifer’s right wing. One of them prods a bullet hole, and Lucifer exhales a raspy squeak of pain. 

“Boss wanted them in good condition, right? I don’t think they’ll heal once we cut them off.”

The bald man scowls and runs his hand along the outer edge of the wing, and opens his mouth to reply. 

It happens fast, almost too fast to see, if Chloe hadn’t been watching them so closely. Lucifer lets out a wounded-animal scream, and slashes with the wing, hard, straining against the chains, tearing through the man’s fingers with bladed feathers, spewing blood into the air. 

The man bellows and lurches forwards, planting his uninjured hand on the side of Lucifer’s head, driving him into the bedframe. Lucifer bucks weakly like he is trying to throw him off. Chloe can see his eyes flickering around wildly, soused with panic, wide and dark in the harsh light. His back rises and falls in frantic, shallow motions.

Chloe’s brain finally catches up with the conversation. “Cut them off?” she whispers to no one. 

Neither of the men pays her any attention. The other man, narrow with dark, slicked hair and neat goatee, sets a bag on the ground and slips a knife out of his belt. Without preamble, he drives it into Lucifer’s side and drags it around, carving him open in a jagged line from his right ribs to where his spine and pelvis join. 

Lucifer cringes away from the blade but doesn’t scream again. 

Chloe watches in shocked horror as the blade comes away dripping red. “What are you doing? Stop!” Her mouth moves without instruction from her brain, yelping the command before she can think through the consequences. 

The bearded man glances up at her and narrows his eyes. “Shut up, bitch. Unless you want some too.”

Lucifer snarls at that, earning him another quick slice with the knife across the small of his back. This time, he does let out a tiny gasp of noise, and squeezes his eyes shut. 

“So what? Cut them off as is?” the bald man asks his partner. 

Vomit wells in the back of Chloe’s mouth.

“Boss’ll be back tomorrow night to get them. They need to be ready by then.” He shrugs. “Might as well just do it. Wounded angel wings aren’t as good as nice healthy ones, but better than no wings at all, I guess.”

“Alright.”

The bald man releases Lucifer’s head and steps away, then pauses. He levels his gaze at Lucifer and snaps, gesturing with his injured hand, “If you try that shit again, we’re gonna carve the cop bitch up in front of you real slow, yeah?” 

Chloe is familiar enough with Lucifer’s shades of wrath to know when he is seething, and he is, now. His eyes wander to her face, and she can see the panic threatening to swallow him, but she doesn’t know if it is over his body being savaged or the threats being leveled against her. The first, probably. She’s sure angels aren’t keen on having their wings manhandled by dirty humans.

And… Chloe doesn’t know if his affection for her has been some elaborate lie meant to disarm her. If there ever was any verisimilitude to anything between then at all. How can she know? Her whole word has just been turned inside out. 

The bearded man begins pulling tools out of his bag. A saw, pliers, duct tape. More drugs. More knives. Bolt cutters.

“We can’t kill her,” says the bald one.

Rage pools in Chloe, hot and sudden and she snarls wordlessly at them as fury blinds her. Both men turn to stare at her dispassionately. 

The bearded man picks up one of the syringes of heroin and gestures at Chloe. “We just need her alive. Boss never said anything about not being drugged out of her gourd.” He’s a little dead behind the eyes, which is scary in its own way, but Chloe is so fucking ready to throw down that she doesn’t care. She bounces on the balls of her feet, adrenaline flooding her system with white noise, ready to lash out the second he gets close enough. 

He approaches her like a predator, gaze sharp, needle ready. 

Lucifer doesn’t give him a chance to get close. With the sound of metal being shredded apart and bone snapping, he frees his leg and kicks the bearded in the back, sending him staggering forwards into Chloe. The syringe skitters across the ground to the darkness at the edge of the room, and Chloe doesn’t hesitate before driving her knee into the man’s groin. He staggers, cursing, and grabs her by the hair, yanking her close.

“Don’t touch her!” Lucifer’s voice is vague and slurred with fury, and the chains screech as he tears against them. 

Chloe slams her head forward so it crashes into the bottom of the man’s chin, smashing his teeth together with an audible crack. He yelps and Chloe ignores the blaze of white-hot pain that races through her skull. The man loses his grip on her hair, and she jerks back, putting the pole between them, breathing hard. 

Lucifer lashes out again, and the bald man yelps and jumps out of range. “Fuck this. Pierce can do it himself. I’m not getting anywhere near that fucking thing.”

The bearded man’s eyes stay locked on Chloe, cold and reptilian, and he spits a glob of blood onto the ground near her. “Fine. Better dose him again, though.”

They both converge on Lucifer, and unlike before, Lucifer struggles. Chloe isn’t sure what changed. Seeing her in danger maybe, or perhaps he was playing along before, but he lashes out with his free leg again, and the Chloe winces as she hears the bones grind together.

“Hey!” The bald man slaps him on the fresh wound across his lower back. “Remember what we said? You want us to hurt her?” 

It’s a rhetorical question, but Lucifer goes still in answer. 

The bearded man grabs Lucifer’s broken ankle and twists it viciously. There is a sharp crack, and it bends way past where it’s supposed to. 

Lucifer hisses, and it sounds like twelve of him are chorused together in a dangerous symphony. Oh, how could Chloe not have seen it before, what he was? His sense of _otherness_ is so looming that it’s hard to breathe. 

Another needle comes out, and Chloe can see it’s only Lucifer’s fear for her wellbeing that keeps him from fighting back as they jam it into his forearm and press the plunger. It only takes a moment before his eyes go sort of cloudy and the fight leaks out of him.

“There. That’s better.”

Without preamble, the men throw their wingectomy supplies back into the black duffle bag from whence they came and toss it into a corner. 

The bearded man pauses at the base of the stairs and looks at Chloe again in a way that makes her feel more naked than she already is. She moves, placing her pole between them again, the metal of the handcuff chain clattering against it in the quiet. “Maybe Pierce will let me have you when we’re done here, before we shoot you and leave your body for the vultures.” He smirks and vanishes back up the stairs. 

Chloe shudders, adrenaline making her limbs shaky and weak. 

They’re going to cut off Lucifer’s wings. 

A memory pulls at her sleep-deprived mind, of another day, another time, years ago, in Lucifer’s penthouse. 

_It’s where I cut my wings off. Well, I didn’t. Maze did. I told her to_.

He had cut them off, hadn’t he? Chloe had seen those two monstrous scars carving across the flesh of his back. Back when her world was small and she thought he had been hurt and abused by a controlling father, not _this_. Not _angel wings_. 

Had Lucifer lied to her? She doesn’t know. Chloe doesn’t know what to think anymore. She had seen the scars and understood that in Lucifer’s version of reality, where he was a besieged fallen angel, it was easier for him to pretend that it had been his choice. Chloe had been a police officer long enough to know that those kind of physical scars came with a litany of phycological ones, and so she played along when Lucifer asked her to help him find his wings.

Had that all been a lie? 

Lucifer says that he never lies, but can she even believe that now? 

He’s the _Devil_.


	3. Chapter 3

Lucifer groans and shifts on the bedframe. The skin on his lower left leg has begun to purple and swell, and the bone is jutting up against the surface of his skin, wrong and painful to the eye.  


Chloe winces and glances away, unable to look at him any longer, unable to continue witnessing his suffering.  


What is true and what is a lie? Is Lucifer just pretending to be weak to play to her protective nature? She wants to scream and tear her hair out in frustration at not knowing. At the loss that may be her entire relationship with him. At the fact that before she loses everything, she has to lose this too.  


The thoughts chase each other in circles around her head as she stares at the wall.  


Her partner.  


The Devil.  


One in the same.  


Something glimmers in the corner, and she squints at it, trying to parse out what it is through the shadows. She’s tired and not exactly firing on all cylinders at the moment, so it takes a second for her to figure out what it is.  


The syringe of heroin. A thrill runs through Chloe’s chest. Pierce’s man forgot about the needle he dropped. If she can get it, she can use it to defend herself, can use it to escape, perhaps. It’s not much, but it’s something, a ray of light in this thunderstorm of total shit. Frantically, Chloe drops down to a crouch and stretches her foot towards it in desperation. It’s out of range by a few feet, and she whimpers in frustration, at possible salvation being so close but still out of reach.  


She forces herself to calm down, to focus on the task at hand. She’s not a quitter.  


Chloe swallows her fear and aching sadness, shelving it out of the way. She slips down so she is on her belly, stretched out across the ground, and reaches. The handcuffs dig into the bruises on her wrists, and she hums against the pain. Her toe brushes something sharp as she prods along with her foot, and carefully, carefully, she pinches it between her toes, scooting it closer. The syringe skitters along the ground and she uses her ankle to scoot it along the ground until it’s within reach.  


Chloe scrambles into a seated position, her ribs creaking, and wraps both hands around the plastic. It’s nothing special but its miles ahead of the nothing she had to work with a few minutes ago.  


She’s familiar enough with drugs, as a police officer, to know that the dose in this needle is enough to be lethal three times over. How the fuck Lucifer is still even close to conscious after two of these in the space of a few hours is beyond her.  


“Det’ive?”  


Chloe freezes at the sound of his voice. She doesn’t move but lets her gaze slide over to Lucifer’s face. His eyes are half-closed and heavy-lidded. Shiny, like black glass. They’re locked onto her, but Chloe can tell he isn’t really seeing her. He sounds confused. Like he did during the week of his recent episode of crazy, but without the manic craziness. Like he’s so far gone that he doesn’t even know where he is.  


Something deep, deep inside her cracks and fissures, and Chloe turns away, fiddling with the needle, focusing on the handcuffs. Ella had showed her once how to get out of them using a paperclip, and Chloe imagines it is similar in concept. She doesn’t know how to pick locks, never had to. With Lucifer’s freakish ability open any lock they come across, it hasn’t been necessary to learn, and she’s a cop beside. She wishes she paid more attention to Ella as she showed off her little party trick, as she called it.  


She messes with jamming the tip into the keyhole and wiggling it around, but that doesn’t seem to do much.  


Lucifer starts humming, a faint, discordant sound that rises and falls like a whimper. There’s no melody, just noise. Chloe hasn’t been around him much when he’s wasted, and she wonders, briefly, if he’s OD’ing (no matter what Pierce says about his tolerance) but she shoves the thought away with vehemence. It doesn’t matter. He’s the Devil, and the Devil can’t die of an overdose.  


Internal debates like this are her new normal, she realizes, and that almost tips her over the edge. The Devil’s tolerance for hard drugs is something she gets to examine up close and personal. Ha-ha, lucky her.  


The blood on Lucifer’s back has begun to trickle down over his hip, dripping over the side of the bedframe onto the floor, mingling with the blood from his wings. The puddle is starting to get big, alarmingly big. Death-by-exsanguination big.  


Chloe digs her teeth into the side of her cheek and tells herself to focus on getting the handcuffs off and nothing else. She prods and pokes and jimmies until her hands are numb, wishing she had a little of Lucifer or Ella’s criminal cleverness.  


Lucifer hums and whimpers, and the darkness at the edges of the room slowly start to lift. It’s dawn, or near it. Chloe drags her knuckles over her gritty eyes. She’s gotten only a few hours of sleep in the past three days, and she can feel a crash incoming, no matter how hard she tries to fight it off.  


A little bar of sunlight pools through the narrow window, illuminating the dust in the air like it’s a solid thing. Overhead, she hears someone walking, and then the faint scent of coffee drifts by, mixing with the metallic reek of blood. She hadn’t even realized how pervasive the smell has become until there’s some relief from it.  


The back of her throat itches in dryness. She’s dehydrated. Starving. Injured. Sleep-deprived. With each passing hour, she gets closer to death.  


Maybe it won’t be so bad, dying.  


Not even Hell can be worse than this.  


For a brief moment, Chloe wonders if she is already dead, and this is it, this is how she’ll spend eternity, but she shakes that notion away like a buzzing fly. Lucifer would have a little more pizazz that this, she’s fairly certain. He’s nothing if not irritatingly creative.  


The syringe slips from between her limp fingers, and her chin jerks hard, jarring her back to full wakefulness from where she’s begun to drift.  


Lucifer’s humming stops.  


Chloe looks over at him, to check if he’s still breathing, or just to make sure he’s not about to sneak up on her, but no, he’s still on the bed. His back is rising and falling in stuttering, sharp motions that don’t look healthy, and as she watches, a little trickle of blood oozes out of the corner of his mouth.  


She could always break her thumb to get free.  


The thought is jarring, but more than that, as grisly as the mental picture is, she’s just about out of options. She’s seen it before, when she was an officer. A kid high on PCP snapped two of his fingers and degloved most of his hand to tear his way out of cuffs, before sprinting away and stumbling into traffic. It’s one that still haunts her on bad days.  


Lucifer mumbles something completely unintelligible, but it sounds like words, or at least like he’s actually trying to make words.  


Chloe wraps her hand around the syringe and watches him out of the corner of her eye. He looks a little more alert, but the bruised shadows under his eyes speak to the same litany of near-death symptoms she’s been feeling for hours.  


“Gotta press ‘own d’tective,” he mumbles.  


Chloe hunches her shoulders. He’s been watching her. He knows what she’s trying to do. Press down?  


“Pr’own n’ pull.” He jerks against his own chains weakly and lets out a weird, manic giggle.  


Chloe rubs her face again, trying to wake herself up, and goes at it again. She positions the needle over the lock of her left wrist and inserts it carefully before pressing down on the cuff. It ratchets tighter on her bruise, and she gasps, about to reprimand Lucifer, but to her shock, when she pulls, the clasp slides lose and falls away from her hand.  


Chloe tumbles back, away from the pole, the handcuffs dangling from her right wrist. She stares at it in shock, her exhausted brain too tired to give more than a tired little _wahoo!_ at the sight of freedom. Or, sort of freedom.  


Overhead, the floor creaks with the sound of footsteps.  


Chloe staggers to her feet, gasping for breath. She can escape. All she needs to do is get upstairs and-  


Her thoughts are derailed as Lucifer whimpers behind her. She whips around, watching, waiting to see if he’s about to do something to disrupt her escape, but he only shifts, his wings trembling.  


Chloe swallows, and stumbles around the edge of the room, keeping the Devil in her eyeline. He helped her get the cuffs off, but that doesn’t mean- it doesn’t mean she can trust him. She skirts around the bed and nearly trips over the duffle bag left behind by their assailants. Chloe drags it closer with her foot, careful not to make any sudden moves, and yanks it open. She needs a weapon. There’s someone upstairs, and they aren’t about to let her just walk out of here without a fight.  


Saw, duct tape, pliers- her hand settles around the bolt cutters. They’re heavy, heavy enough to incapacitate if she swings hard enough. She may be weak with pain and fatigue, but she’s scared and pissed off enough to still be dangerous.  


She hopes.  


Chloe grips the bolt cutters with white knuckles and stumbles up the stairs, trying to ignore the way the world is gently swooping from side to side with each step.  


The door at the top of the stairs isn’t locked.  


She nudges it open, listening hard. The house is quiet, but she can sense another presence here with her, somewhere. Not Lucifer. Cautiously, she slips out into the hallway and creeps forwards towards the front door. She is only a few feet from it when she hears a snort from her left, and freezes.  


The hall opens to a dirty kitchen with a round table and two chairs around it. Most of the cabinets are doorless and empty, and cardboard has been taped over the window, one corner of is peeling away from the glass, letting in some of the morning sunlight.  


The bearded man is seated in one of the chairs, his head tilted back, feet on the table, snoring.  


Chloe watches him, frozen with indecision, trying not to breath. His back is to her. If she runs, she might be able to get away.  


He lets out another snore.  


She takes one tiny step closer to the front door, emboldened by her lack of guard, and the wood under her groans, comically loud in the silence.  


The man jerks awake with a snort, and Chloe makes a split-second decision to bolt. She lunges for the door and rips it open, staggering out into the brilliant California sunshine, tripping over her own feet as the sun blinds her. Behind her, she can hear the man screaming obscenities.  


She stumbles to her feet, but he’s already close, stomping out on her heels. Chloe reacts to his proximity on instinct, and as he grabs for her, she swings the bolt cutters like a pro baseball player, smashing them into the side of his head with wet crunch.  


He falls to ground, blood already welling at his temple, eyes glassy. Chloe doesn’t know if he’s dead, doesn’t want to know. She’s killed in the line of duty before, but always with her sidearm. Never this up close and personal. She drags her hand over her face, and it comes away red from his blood. She clings to the bolt cutters and backs away until she hits the wall of the house, waiting for him to move, to come after her again.  


He groans but doesn’t sit up, doesn’t move.  


The desert beckons before her, brilliant and golden, promising freedom. Chloe wants to run out there despite knowing it will probably kill her. Dying of heat stroke out there, free, is better than staying here a prisoner to be raped and murdered.  


She wavers.  


She’ll die if she stays and die if she goes.  


How does the saying go? Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.  


Murder is a sin. She wonders if there’s an exception for killing in self-defense.  


Choe shakes her head from side to side, trying to physically jumpstart the rational, problem solving part of her brain, but it’s so hard and she’s just so _tired_.  


“Escape. Car. Keys?” she whispers to herself, just to keep on task. She steps off the low wooden porch and makes a lazy, winding circle in the dust. There’s no vehicle anywhere in sight, and part of her is confused by that, because the man is here and he must have gotten here somehow, but her head is swimming too much to connect the dots at the moment. Chloe stumbles along one of the walls, her hand trailing over the cinderblocks to guide her, and makes half a lap around the building, looking for… something. Something she’ll know when she finds it.  


Chloe stumbles again and falls to her knees in front of a low window. The basement window. 

She stares at it as she tries to swallow in her impossibly dry throat.  


Lucifer is in there, still.  


Lucifer is going to die unless she helps him.  


Chloe inches forwards and presses her face to the window. He’s still in there, chained down, still and bloody and winged.  


The fear comes back at the sight of the wings through the dirty glass, at what they _mean_, but it’s a pinprick, dulled by panic and physical pain and exhaustion to a manageable level.  


Chloe thinks, then, of the kiss. Of his lips gently pressing against hers, of him whispering her name as he reaches up to brush his fingers along her jaw. Of the promise that maybe, just maybe, they could have something _more_. She presses her palm to the glass, smearing the dust. Lucifer is the Devil. Dangerous by definition, but… she knows that already. She’s always known that.  


She doesn’t know how much it changes, but it changes _something_, enough for her to know that even if she doesn’t have the answer right now, she needs the chance to think it over, and for that, he has to live.  


Chloe claws herself upright, moving sluggishly in the building heat. Making the decision has given her the second wind she needs to get her ravaged body back into the monster house and back down the stairs.  


Lucifer remains prone on the bed. He twitches when Chloe flops back down the stairs, and whispers, “Detective?”  


She approaches him softly. At the sight of his face, it’s angles so familiar under the blood and bruises, the fear dies and he’s just Lucifer again. Her partner. Her best friend. One of the few people in this world she loves. “I’m here,” Chloe chokes out, a ragged sob escaping with the word. How could she have thought of abandoning him for even a second?  


She hefts the bolt cutters and moves to his legs. They didn’t bother to relock his right, and the ankle is twisted and swollen. Working quickly, Chloe wedges the mouth around the first padlock and snips it, her arms trembling with the effort. She makes quick work of the ones around his waist and arms, loosening the chains and casting them aside, hype-aware of the semi-conscious man outside who may wake at any moment and come after them, before she steps back to examine the chains holding the wings aloft. She’s afraid to touch them, afraid to cause him any more pain. “Lucifer, can you move? Can you get out?”  


He doesn’t respond.  


Chloe’s heart leaps into her throat. “Lucifer?” She crouches unsteadily next to him and tilts his face towards her. He’s pale, too pale, wan and waxy, and he’s cold. Chloe leans close, and can hear him wheezing, but other than that, he exhibits no signs of life. It’s jarring, seeing someone usually so full of energy and glee be so still.  


Chloe wastes no more time. She counts backwards from five, then yanks the chain over the widest part of the wing, ignoring the groan of tendons and arch of Lucifer’s spine as it jerks. The left wing slips loose of its chains and falls to Lucifer’s side, spread across the ground in a shimmering, feathery carpet. The feathers are warm as they brush past Chloe’s bare leg, and she steps to the side quickly to avoid touching them. It feels wrong, for some reason.  


She does the same to the right wing, and Lucifer groans, summoned back to consciousness by the pain. Chloe dives down and cradles his face between her hands, trying not to move him too much. “Lucifer?” The wings still look wrong on his back, askew and out of place. She doesn’t know how to fix them, and it’s going to be very hard to get him anywhere with those two things flopping around on his back. They’re big, easily as tall as him, and as wide across even half furled. He has some way to hide them though, because until yesterday she’s never seen them, and he’s had them for at least as long as she’s known him, hasn’t he? “Can you put them away?”  


Lucifer doesn’t answer, and the wings stay put.  


“Lucifer?” She gently smacks the side of his face to get his attention.  


His onyx eyes slide open, black and glassy and empty. Chloe sinks back on her heels. Lucifer is six-three, easy, and slim but muscular. She can’t lift him on her own, especially not hauling around two extra appendages.  


It doesn’t matter. She’ll find a way.  


Chloe crawls over to the duffel bag and roots around inside. Its contents are nauseating, all tools for a violent backyard surgery. The saw she discards, unwilling to entertain any plan that may require it. The duct tape she slips over her forearm. Everything else she considers before leaving in the bag. It’s very clear that Pierce had no intention of Lucifer surviving this operation, and rage clouds her vision for a brief moment.  


_Fucking psychopath_.  


The wound on Lucifer’s back is still bleeding sluggishly. Chloe rips off a few chunks of the tape and does her best to wipe the blood away so it will stick, trying to be fast and gentle. She wishes she has on more clothing so she could clean the wound a little more and bandage it better, but this is better than nothing.  


“Okay, time to go.” She crawls back over to Lucifer’s head, talking in a soft voice, the kind of voice she uses when Trixie is sick and needs love and attention. “I’m gonna take care of you. I’m not gonna leave you here.” She runs her fingers through Lucifer’s nest of dark hair, one brief stroke, a comforting instinct built into every mother, and grabs his arms, hauling him forwards so his chest is pressed to her back, and struggles to rise to her feet. Her thighs scream at the extra two hundred pounds of weight, but she pushes through it, her muscles burning like they’re on fire.  


She lurches forwards, hunching to get Lucifer’s torso higher on her back. He huffs a little puff of air near her ear, and she feels stubble brush against the side of her neck as his head lolls.  


Somehow, Chloe gets them upstairs. She doesn’t remember how. Little black spots dance in her vision, and it’s all she can do to keep moving forward, her and her fallen angel with his broken wings.  


The wings prove to be a problem, cumbersome as they are, and Chloe decides that force is the way to go. He’s already hurt. A little more damage won’t kill him, and it’s better than being caught and trapped once again. So, she hauls him forwards with no regard for the way the wings scrape and catch on the narrow walls of the hallway, until she stumbles out into the sunlight, Lucifer a dead weight across her back, legs dragging in the dust.  


The bearded man is still splayed out on his back in a spreading pool of blood. Chloe pays him no mind as she steps forwards onto the dry, packed earth. She has no plan other than following the tire treads for a while before finding somewhere to hide and reassess the situation.  


Every inch of her body is screaming in pain at the effort of hauling Lucifer forwards, of her feet touching the sun baked earth, of the bullet bruise on her chest and the handcuff bruises on her wrists, of her cuts and scrapes. Chloe doesn’t listen. She puts one foot in front of the other, stumbling blindly into the light, weaving between the creosote bushes like a drunk.  


She steps and steps and steps until suddenly the ground vanishes from beneath her and she falls, tumbling face first down a sandy, shallow wash. She loses her grip on Lucifer, and it takes several long seconds before she can move, sit up and figure out what the hell just happened.  


It seems that they tumbled down a shallow gully. Lucifer is cast out on his side, the wings spread behind him. Chloe crawls to his side, but she knows in her gut that she doesn’t have the energy to move him again. She barely has the energy to move herself.  


So she doesn’t.  


This gulley is as good a place as any to hide until she can figure out what to do. She slumps down beside him and watches until the sun blots out her vision in a field of burning yellow.  


∞∞∞  


Chloe comes to with sharp, aching cough that leaves her with the impression that she hadn’t been breathing. Her chest aches terribly, and she chokes in a lung full of dusty air as her head spins. It feels like trying to breath in burning coals, and she coughs again. It feels like she’s moving, like the ground is twirling beneath her, but she can’t make heads or tails as to how.  


It isn’t the ground, she realizes. She’s spinning. She cracks open her eyes to see an endless expanse of blue so intense it hurts to look at. She blinks and reaches up to shield her eyes only to be wacked in the jaw by a metal cuff.  


Chloe squints at the glinting silver bracelet in confusion. Did she get arrested? Why does she have one handcuff on?  


Someone coughs next to her, and with a monumental effort, she turns her head.  


Lucifer lays on his side beside her, eyes closed, skin sunburned and peeling.  


It all comes back at once.  


Pierce. The shoot-out. The wings. The desert.  


Chloe jerks into a seated position, her head spinning. The few hours of respite, even baking under the hot sun, have cleared her head considerably. Even with the worsening dehydration making her skull pound with every throb of her heart, her thoughts feel much more orderly than before.  


They need to move, that much is clear. The sun has shifted low in the western horizon. If Chloe has to guess, she would say it’s about four or five in the afternoon. It’s late enough for there to be a shallow puddle of shadow cast from the opposite side of the wash, and the promise of even a little relief from the heat beckons her.  


Her eyes wander to Lucifer’s naked body. He’s curled in on himself in the fetal position, like he is instinctively trying to protect his soft underbelly from danger. Chloe reaches over and rests her hand on his thigh. His skin is painfully hot to the touch.  


Standing seems about as real as flying in that moment, so Chloe crawls across the sand towards the shade, rolling and dragging Lucifer with her inch by inch until he is mostly in shadow. She wriggles him onto his side in the recovery position, figuring that will be the kindest position for his ravaged back, and slumps again the sandstone wall, pressing as much of her body into it as possible. The rough stone scraps against her exposed ribs and agitates her sunburn, but it is noticeable cooler to the touch than the sand and air around her.  


For a long time, Chloe simply sits, her mind blank, watching the reassuring rise and fall of Lucifer’s chest as he breathes. Her bottom lip feels hot and tight and she keeps compulsively darting her tongue across it, rasping over skin as dry as the desert air.  


As much as she hates to think it, this really might it. She’s lost in the middle of the Mojave with nothing but half a roll of duct tape and a mortally wounded fallen angel for company. No water, no clothes, no help, no idea where she is.  


Some fucking luck she has.  


The shadows deepen as Chloe mopes, and she finds herself watching Lucifer, examining the lines of his body, taking stock of his status. She can see the little cluster of black needle marks in the crook of his forearm, and another in the side of his neck. From her position, she can’t see his back, but she is painfully aware of the two knife wounds there, taped over in haphazard field dressing. She leans over to make sure the tape is holding, and it is. A bit of Lucifer’s sunburn peels up as Chloe’s hand brushes over his bare hip, and she retches at the sensation of it shedding and flaking away into the wind.  


His leg is still bad, bent backward above his right ankle and purple almost up to his knee, but there isn’t anything she can do for it. She doesn’t know how to set bone.  
Chloe’s eyes finally wander across his chest, to the red line that bisects his sternum, and pauses. Is that the stab wound from the gallery? It has to be. There’s nothing else it could be, but how is it… how is already almost healed?  


She reaches out and brushes her fingers across the line, and quick like a snake, Lucifer snatches her wrist in a grip that’s weak but run through with an undercurrent of power. Like even wounded, he could snap it like a twig, if he cared to.  


Chloe freezes, panic rearing up in her chest, hot and ugly for one brief second, before she forces it back down into a tight little ball that she can bury deep inside herself and never examine.  


Lucifer’s dark eyes drift open, and it takes several hazy seconds of him looking at her before he seems to recognize her. He blinks against some of the grit decorating his eyelashes. “Detective?” His fingers spasm around her wrist. His voice is low and raspy with confusion.  


Chloe brings up her other hand and rests in on his, caressing his knuckles.  


_Don’t, please_.  


_Okay._  


She doesn’t know what to say. It’s sinking in, really, for the first time that Lucifer could die, right here, soon. Chloe’s breath hitches in her chest, fighting the iron bands encircling her rib cage, keeping her gasping sobs trapped inside where they’re safe.  


“Detective?”  


She breaks. “Please don’t die.” She plants her hand over the not-wound on his chest and brings the other to his face. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.”  


The muscles around Lucifer’s mouth twitch into a weak smile. “Oh, you know me, Detective. I can never stay away from a good time.”  


It would be more convincing if he wasn’t bone-pale and bleeding sluggishly into the sand. If he could maintain eye contact with her for more than a few seconds before he begins to drift once again.  


Chloe laughs and drags her hand under her nose, wiping away the snot, and tries to force herself to calm down. “You’re bleeding,” she sniffles.  


Lucifer’s façade of calm is cracking around the edges. His forced smile slips for a second, and Chloe can see him gritting his teeth against the pain now that he isn’t drugged out of his mind any longer. Her eyes go again to his chest, to the scratch that is all that remains of the stab wound. “You’re bleeding,” she says again.  


Something pained flashes in Lucifer’s eyes, something beyond physical discomfort.  
Chloe drags her hand over her face again, and leans back, out of reach. “You’re bleeding. How are you bleeding? How are you bleeding from the bullet wounds, but not from a stab wound to the chest?” Her voice winds higher with distress. “I saw Pierce stab you! I’ve shot you! How are you only injured sometimes, Lucifer? I don’t understand.”  


He opens his mouth, and she snaps, “And _don’t_ say you’re immortal. I want a real answer.”  


Lucifer closes his mouth, chastised, and his eyes drift shut again before he says in a measured voice, “I am immortal, but I can be wounded by hell forged steel. Maze’s knives. That doesn’t matter…”  


Chloe senses more coming, but his mind seems to be wandering. “And?” she prompts.  
His eyes flick open, finding hers, incredibly soft. “I am only vulnerable when I’m close to you.”  


It’s like someone has hit her over the head with a frying pan. The words don’t want to string together in her brain in a way that makes sense. Vulnerable?  


But… but he’s the _Devil_.  


That doesn’t make any _sense._  


“But… but you got stabbed, and now you’re okay, I don’t…?”  


“I’m still immortal, Detective. When I’m not around you, I heal quickly.”  


Chloe looks at the mark on his chest. “Seriously?” But the evidence is right there in front of her eyes. “So you, usually immortal, can be hurt when you’re around me?” she blinks, her stomach twisting meanly as a bunch more little things about him settle into place. “And you hang out with me anyway? What the fuck is wrong with you! When we’re on a case, you run into danger like it doesn’t matter and it’s like, the only time it really does for you? What the Hell, Lucifer!”  


Lucifer laughs, and it turns into a cough, his arms shuddering. “Funny Detective,” he chokes out. “I’m meant to be the amusing rapscallion in this partnership.”  


Chloe bobs her head some weird approximation of a nod. It really is hard to stat mad at him when he’s on the verge of death like this. “Well, you aren’t feeling well, so I’m here to pick up the slack. What are partner for?” Her eyes slide to the wings. The sun has gone down further, painting the sky in a rainbow of violets and reds and golds, and between the patches of blood, the feathers reflect them back like an oil slick. “But… how are your wings still hurt, but your chest is okay?” Chloe assimilates the information, trying to piece together her world view with all this new mind-breaking stuff factored in. Sure, her presence makes the Devil susceptible to injury. If she wasn’t completely spent in the mind-bending-revelations department already, she’s sure it would bother her a lot more, but honestly, she’s so _tired_ at this point, and really, does it even matter? The _how_ and _why_ aren’t important. The _what_ is. The _what_ is real. The _what_ is the handful of bullet wounds and Pollock spattering of blood marring his wings, draining him dry.  


“I don’t know. I’ve… I’ve been in and out.” The way he says it, it’s like he’s admitting to something shameful. “Perhaps Pierce moved you away from me at some point.”  


Chloe thinks back, trying to link the events of the past day together in a linear fashion, like beads on a string. “The truck, maybe. They brought you in a different truck.”  


Lucifer tilts his head in a weak nod. “Perhaps.”  


An ugly thought wanders into Chloe’s brain, and she scowls. “If I…” she licks her bottom lip again, wishing she had a gallon of water she could chug. She’s never been so thirsty in her entire life. “If I left you, would you get better?”  


She dislikes the burst of fear that darts across Lucifer’s face almost as much as she dislikes the idea of leaving him alone out here. But it’s up to him. If he tells her to go, she will.  


Lucifer shakes his head. There is a long, percolating silence, and then he says in a raw voice, “I can handle the pain, Detective. I would rather not be without you.”  


“Okay,” she says.  


“Besides,” he continues. “If I were to become invulnerable once again in this state, I would hate to think what might happen to my- of what might happen.”  


Chloe is familiar enough with his evasions to fill in the end of that sentence. “With your wings?” It comes out a whisper, like she’s in a church. Like the fragile quiet is something sacrament and she is loath to break the tiny shards of peace it holds.  


Lucifer’s silence acts as an affirmation, and Chloe is reminded once again of how violently Pierce ripped them out of place, and shudders in sympathy.  


“How bad is it?”  


He takes a long, long time to answer, almost long enough for her to worry that he’s slipping away again, but no, his gaze is clouded with pain, but sharp. “Bad,” he finally admits. “I can’t move them.” Fear colors his voice into something raw and dark and strange.  


Far overhead, a plane passes in a dark fleck against the red sky.  


Chloe nods once, then again. Okay. Lucifer can’t move his wings or walk on his broken leg or be moved without being in tremendous agony. This tethers them in place, which is not ideal. They need to be able to move, to get further away from Pierce’s men and find help. So Chloe needs to find a solution to this problem. “Okay. Can we fix them? Somehow?” She shifts onto her knees and leans over Lucifer so she can see the place where his back connects with the wings.  


Lucifer swallows audibly. He’s lost a lot of blood and is probably even more dehydrated than she is. “I’m not sure. Something feels… wrong.” The right wing twitches, unfurls slightly against the sand, and Chloe sees him seize up, as though the motion brings unendurable agony that he can’t bring himself to voice in front of her.  


Without thinking, she reaches out and rubs a comforting little circle on Lucifer’s shoulder. His muscles are like stone under her hand, knotted and tense. “What do you remember?” She’s never going to get the image of Pierce bending the wing out of place out of her mind, not ever. Not the sick popping sound of it breaking. Not the way Lucifer screamed.  


Not the way he’s barely holding it together now.  


“Bits and pieces. You, mostly.”  


Chloe forces herself to stand and carefully pick her way around his fallen body so she can look at his back. She needs to roll him onto his stomach, so she can see what’s happening. “Pierce bent them.” It’s easier to recount when she’s splitting her focus. “Do they attach like an arm? That’s what it looked like.”  


Lucifer chuckles weakly. “I suppose. When Maze…” He trails off, and Chloe lets him. Her heartbeat is suddenly very loud in her ears. “When Maze cut them off, she had to pop the bone out as well. It was quite painful, but I was high as a kite at the time and feeling quite spiteful towards my father and Amenadiel, so that made it easier to endure.”  


“So, what if I try to pop them back in?” Chloe cringes as she says it. She doesn’t know anything about fixing dislocated limbs, let alone the specifics of angel physiology. There is a good chance that she may just make it worse. That she may damage Lucifer permanently. “If you tell me what to do, can I fix them?”  


There is a long silence before Lucifer speaks. “I can’t… I don’t think I will be of much help,” he acquiesces finally. “I’m finding it hard to… it’s quite painful. You didn’t happen to grab any more of those narcotics with you on our way out, did you Detective?”  


Chloe can’t tell if he’s being serious or not, but all things considered, she can’t blame him for wanting a little escapism in the form or recreational drug use. Lucifer is an addict; it’s what he does when he can’t deal with something, and besides all that, if any situation on the planet calls for dosing up with a truckload of heroin, this would be it.  


The quip makes up Chloe’s mind for her, though. She can’t let him languish like this any longer, not if there is a chance that she can help him. Chloe moves to his head and places her hands on his shoulders. “I’m gonna roll you onto your stomach.” She doesn’t wait for him to say anything, just twists, shifting his weight.  


Lucifer yelps, and Chloe winces but doesn’t stop until he is prostrate on his belly. The right wing is slumped over along his back, scrunched up in an uncomfortable looking position, and Chloe doesn’t waste any time, reaching forwards to grab it.  


“Wait.”  


She freezes, her hand outstretched over the outer curve of the wing, one of the few spots that has no bullet wounds.  


“The flight feathers are sharp, Detective. Be careful, will you?” Lucifer manages between gritted teeth.  


Chloe nods to herself, and gently settles her hand onto the edge of wing, clenching until she has a good grip on the bone below. She doesn’t let herself think about the fact that she’s holding an angel wing. She doesn’t let herself think about the fact that the angel it’s attached to, fallen or not, is only wounded because of her. With delcate fingers, she prods along the base of the wing, where tiny downy feathers meet his skin, and she can feel where it divots, where the absence of bone is. Cautiously, she guides the- the humerous?- of the wing upright until the bone aligns with the socket and gently presses downward.  


It snaps in with sharp pop, and instantly the wing flares out, knocking Chloe back on her ass. Lucifer lets out a cry that’s half pain, half ecstasy, and Chloe scrambles over to him, running her hand along the side of his face. “Are you okay?”  


“Do the other one, please, do the other one, Detective, _please_.”  


She strokes his jaw one last time before moving to the left wing. Lucifer shudders under her hands, and she doesn’t know if it’s from the anticipation of the pain stopping, or the agony of having her guide the head of the bone back in place. Both, maybe.  


It snaps back into place easier than the other one, and Lucifer doesn’t manage to hold in the little sob of relief bubbling in his chest. Chloe moves back to his head and crouches down in front him. His eyes are screwed up, and he’s whispering something, but she can’t make out any words. She waits, letting him ride it out, stroking his hair and his neck and his shoulders with feather-light touches.  


“Thank you, Detective,” he finally whispers. Chloe hopes that he’ll be able to put them away, but instead they come to rest in a half-furled position a little wider than his shoulders. Not great, but manageable. Under the circumstances, she’ll take it. It looks as though the bleeding has slowed as well, and stopped in some places.  


“You’re gonna be okay.” Chloe doesn’t let the tail of that sentence rise up into a question. She refuses to acknowledge any other outcome as a possibility. “Can you sit up?”  


Lucifer nods, and with some shuffling, she manages to get him partially upright, so his side is pressed against her and his head is resting in the crook of her neck. Chloe can feel each of his exhalations skating across the exposed skin of her collarbones, and for the first time, she feels embarrassed that they’re both basically naked.  


Well, Lucifer is naked, except for his wings. At least she has on underwear. It says something rather dire about the state of him that he can’t even bring himself to crack a joke about seeing her boobs.  


His broken leg is extended out in front of them, and with a little more shuffling, he manages to get it into a position that isn’t jostling the bone. Chloe is no doctor, but that looks bad. As bad as a broken bone can be. In comparison, her bruised and cracked ribs don’t feel so nasty.  


Lucifer fingers the long scrape on her forearm. With his wings no longer dislocated, he seems to have regained almost full mobility in his upper body, something Chloe hadn’t even realized had been such a problem before. She wonders for a brief moment if perhaps the bones were pressing on his spine, but then she lets it go. It doesn’t matter.  


“When did this happen?”  


“After they took us. In the truck.” It’s scabbed over so at least it isn’t getting super dirty. She’s going to need it debrided at the hospital, which is going to be sucktastic. “When we get back-“ she stumbles, a new horror dawning in her brain. “Holy shit, Lucifer, what are we gonna do? I can’t take you to a hospital, can I?”  


He chuckles, and it almost sounds as though the sound holds some trace of genuine mirth. “Probably not,” he murmurs. “It’s alright, Detective. Once we get back to safety, you can leave me at LUX for a few days with a pile of narcotics and I’ll pull through.”  


Chloe glares at the top of his head, but she knows that now isn’t the time to press that particular issue. There are about twelve other problems they need to solve before they can even have that argument. Lucifer sounds exhausted and drawn, and she understands; she is too, but they can’t stay here. “What about your leg?”  


“What about it?”  


“If we leave it alone, will it… fix itself?”  


Lucifer tilts his head and considers it. Chloe isn’t sure if she’s imagining it, but it looks less bruised than it did last night. “Not quickly enough for us to be able to walk anywhere,” he concedes.  


Chloe nods, nausea creeping up the back of her throat at the sneaking suspicion of what she’s going to have to do. She took a first aide class, ages ago, when she became an officer, and there was a section on field dressing broken bones. If she can set the bone, or try to, she can make a split out of the duct tape and bits of creosote.  


Lucifer, it seems, has been following her line of thought. “I’d rather you didn’t.”  


Chloe leans away from him and is relieved when he is able to hold himself in a seated position without her support. “Lucifer, I can’t carry you. I’m not strong enough.”  


They can’t stay here. They need to find a road before it’s too dark to see anything.  


Chloe makes the executive decision, and rises to her feet, swaying as the world bubbles around the edges. She stays close, keeping Lucifer in view, both unwilling to acknowledge that little knife of fear in her whispering that he may vanish the second he’s out of sight, but also unable to ignore it. She wrestles some the creosote into submission, stripping it of spiny clumps of leaves until she has enough to give the splint a little structure.  


Lucifer glowers at her when she returns, but stays silent. Behind him, his wings puff out like he’s trying to make himself look bigger than he actually is. It makes him look like a like some weird freaked out cat, and Chloe bites down on a manic and very inappropriate laugh at that mental image.  


She choses to ignore him, and gently lays her hand on his shin. Lucifer twitches under her palm but doesn’t pull away. Before she can rethink her plan, she bends his leg, and retches as she feels the bones grind together under her hands. She expects Lucifer to scream, but he doesn’t. His face goes pale, and he clenches his jaw and endures in silence. As soon as the leg is straight, Chloe lets go and backs away. Vomit boils at the base of her throat, she heaves into the dirt, bile leaving her mouth in a thin, acidic streams.  


It takes her a few minutes to get her shit together. For some reason, his leg bothers her more than the wings. Maybe because she doesn’t have wings and that inherent empathy just isn’t there, but she does have legs, and can image how having a bone snapped feels, of how shudderingly awful the raw broken ends grating together must be.  


The sky is a deep, inky violet by the time she can straighten up and walk back over to him. The first stars are just beginning to emerge, and Lucifer’s face is tilted up towards them with an expression of vague longing. “I made those, you know.” His speech has gone little slurred again, from the shock of it all, she thinks.  


Chloe doesn’t have the energy to reply. She uses the rest of the duct tape to splint his leg, moving in a numb haze until the job is done, then sits back on her heels, breathing hard.  


“Detective?”  


She shakes her head, unable to answer. It’s all crashing down on her at once, the crazy awfulness of the last few days. They were kidnapped by her former fiancé turned crime boss who murdered another one of their friends. Lucifer is the Devil, and she’s using very inadequate field medic skills to patch him up because she makes him mortal.  


It’s… it’s… there are no words for what this is.  


In the end, Lucifer is the one who gets her up and moving.  


He claws his way to his feet and limps over to her, reaching out with one shaky hand to touch her shoulder. “Detective?”  


Chloe snaps out of it. “Yeah? Yes, yeah, I’m good. I’m fine.”  


Lucifer squints at her, mistrust clear in his eyes, but doesn’t comment. Chloe slings her right arm around his middle, and helps him gimp along through the wash. Lucifer steers her towards the right a little bit, until they are walking through the evening desert in a wobbly line. “This way is west,” is all he says to provide an explanation, and she understands. West will eventually take them to civilization. To home.  


Something else he said earlier comes back to her, and she asks unthinkingly, “You made the stars?”  


“Yes.” Between the labored, breathy gasps of pain, he sounds rather pleased with himself. “Lucifer means Lightbringer, Detective.”  


“They’re beautiful.”  


Chloe feels him preen under her arm, and out of the corner of her eyes, she sees the wings puff up in pleasure. Huh. That’s interesting. Like a giant feathery mood ring.  


They walk for a long time. The desert passes unchangingly underfoot, hot and scratchy. The air temperature sinks like a stone in water, going from blazing hot to freezing quicker than Chloe thinks is reasonable. The sweat drying on her skin makes her shiver, and she finds herself pressing as much of her body into Lucifer’s side as possible, sucking up his warmth.  


Out past the hills that lay a slighter darker shade black than the sky, the yipping of a pack of coyotes rises in the night, eerie and echoing across the sand. The sound curls around her shoulders and makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.  


When they find the road, Chloe almost starts to cry. The ground underfoot changes from packed sand to rough asphalt, still warm from baking in the sun. It stings at the pads of her feet, and even though it’s just a little two-lane highway, the orange reflector paint faded and dusty, she’s never seen anything so beautiful.  


Lucifer unwinds his arm from her shoulders and collapses more than anything else onto the edge of the road with a low groan. He’s been remarkably tough, all things considered, but Chloe can see from the way he’s swaying that he doesn’t have anything left to give. He looks up at her beseechingly, face pale and drawn in the glow of the stars, silently begging for it to be over.  


Chloe crouches next to him with a nod and runs her fingers through his hair. “We can stop here. It’s okay. You can rest.”  


It’s a testament to how truly awful he must feel, because he slumps over on his side and passes out before her words have even echoed into silence. Chloe stays close to him, clinging to his head, brushing her fingers through his matted, sweaty hair. Darkness swirls at the edges of her vision, and every time she blinks, it takes more and more focus to open them again. She can’t sleep. She needs to stay conscious so she can watch over Lucifer. So she can flag down a passing vehicle, if there is one.  


She can’t close her eyes, because if she does, she’s afraid she’ll never open them again.  


Lucifer’s wings look like starlight, underneath all the gore. Chloe thinks that once it’s washed off and he’s feeling better, that they would be truly beautiful. Maybe he’ll let her see. It’s not like he can possibly have any more secrets, after this. _Actually being_ an immortal fallen angel is pretty much the biggest secret anyone can have. She hopes.  


She blinks and jerks her head up from where it’s come to rest on her chest. Lucifer has shifted closer to her, and his head now rests in her lap, his arms twined around her waist as he clings to her like a lifeline.  


In the distance, a little yellow light appears, wobbling through the air like a firefly.  


Lucifer mumbles something into her hip, and Chloe goes back to running her fingernails over his scalp to sooth him. He’s not usually so touchy-feely, and she’s enjoying this, being able to be this close without him pulling away from her. He so rarely lets her be this tender with him.  
The light draws closer, and Chloe absently wonders what it could be.  


Overhead, the stars wheel in silver lines against the black of night. Out here away from civilization and the ever-present light pollution of Los Angeles, she can see thousands and thousands of them, more than the just the brightest handful that manage to shine through the smog. The light trails and blends together in tails.  


Lucifer made those.  


Chloe digs her fingers into his hair. He made those stars, burning up in the void of space. He made those lovey things, brought them into being with his own light.  


A sound tugs at her attention, and she turns her head, looking down the road. The lights have grown into two little beams, drawing closer, and it takes several seconds for Chloe’s strung-out brain to put two and two together.  


Headlights.  


She gasps, and moves, shifting clumsily out from under Lucifer, who grunts in surprise at the sudden movement. Chloe stumbles to her feet and moves jerkily, like a marionet with its strings torn asunder, into the center of the road.  


Help, please let it be help. She doesn’t let herself think about Lucifer’s wings, and how they’re still out and visible. That doesn’t matter. They need _help._  


The car draws closer, vanishing briefly in dip between two rocky hills before resurfacing, bathing Chloe in light. Tires screech on the pavement as Chloe flings her arm over her face to shield her vision from the headlights. They’re yellow with age, dimmed under a layer of dust, nothing like the neon brightness of newer vehicles. It stops, and past the corona of light, Chloe can see that it’s a pick-up truck in an indiscriminately dark color, and for some reason, that fills her with unease.  


For a moment, the truck idles there, Chloe standing in its path. This must look bad, a mostly naked woman covered in dirt and dried blood with a pair of broken handcuffs hanging off one wrist. There have to be fewer things more alarming to encounter driving alone on a desert highway at night, after all.  


She glances over her shoulder at Lucifer. He’s risen to a crouch, favoring his broken leg, eyes narrowed in suspicion. In the slanted light, they flash a flat red, reflective and eerie, like those of a cat.  


Chloe turns back to the truck at the sound of its driver’s side door opening, filling the night air with creaking of hinges and the pinging of keys left in the ignition. Someone steps out, a man if she had to guess, judging from the height and build, but the headlights throw shadows in strange places, obscuring his face.  


She steps forwards, hoping he’ll focus on her, not on Lucifer and his impossible wings. “We need help,” she croaks.  


The man moves, stepping around the door. His footsteps crunch across the asphalt as he draws closer, and Chloe feels the hair on the back of her neck stand on end in sudden, gut-clenching fear.  


The shot pops off and she jumps, throwing up her arms in an instinct of self-defense, even though its completely worthless against a gunshot. Behind her, Lucifer grunts, and she hears him hit the ground. Heart throbbing in a frenetic thunder, Chloe stumbles back, and the man advances, eating up the distance between then with easy strides until he’s close enough for her to see his face.  


It’s Pierce.


	4. Chapter 4

Pierce snarls at her and the barrel of a gun fills Chloe’s vision. She has half a second to think, _oh, this is it, after all of this, he’s still going kill me_ when a blurry white shape slams into Peirce, knocking him over. Another gunshot sings through the air, and Chloe feels it graze her hair. 

Lucifer rolls on top of Peirce and wraps his hands around his throat. The gun goes flying, landing somewhere outside their circle of light. His bloody wings are haloed by the headlights, flaring with danger, each feather razor sharp and precise. He growls at Pierce, a wild dangerous sound that speaks to eons of Lucifer being able to survive somewhere like Hell. 

Pierce drives his fist into Lucifer’s side, and it comes away bloody. Lucifer yelps like a kicked dog, and they roll in a tangle across the road. One of his wings slams into Chloe and she goes flying, crashing into the low sand bank at the edge of the road. She lays there for a moment, stunned, as the angel and the man pummel each other. 

They roll so that Pierce is on top, his knees pinning the wings down, and even over the ringing in her ears from the gun, Chloe can hear the delicate bones in them cracking and breaking. She rolls onto her side, dizziness swimming over her in waves, and winces as a fist sized rock jabs her in the ribs. 

“I will not be some weak mortal!” Peirce screams as his fist slams the side of Lucifer’s jaw. “I will have them!”

Chloe rolls to her feet, clutching the rock. Pierce has lost his mind; the wings, the raw exposure to divinity has driven him mad. Maybe they’ve driven her mad too, because she has no plan, no course of action to follow, except for the black hole of rage tearing through her body, ambulating her limbs as she lunges forwards and smashes the rock into Pierce’s temple with all her might.

He rolls off Lucifer, stunned, and Chloe’s momentum carries her with him. For a moment, she’s slumped over his body, and it’s like they’re together again, after a night together where he was just a little too demanding, a little too rough with her, and without thinking, she brings the rock down on his skull again. It connects with a crack that reverberates through her entire skeleton, slicing through the calm night air like lightning. 

Peirce groans, and when she winds up for a third hit, he shoots his arm forwards and grabs the loose end of the handcuffs dangling between them. He twists, sharp and hard, and Chloe’s wrist snaps under the sudden change in pressure and speed. The rock tumbles from her numb fingers. 

Chloe screams as a bolt of white-hot pain lances up her arm, but she can’t stop, can’t let him win, can’t let him hurt Lucifer anymore. She forces her arm to move, to grab Pierce’s face and pull it close, almost like she means to kiss him. “Go to Hell.” The words are almost unintelligible with pain and fear and rage, leaving her body in a screech like tearing metal, and she slams the back of his head down onto the asphalt, over and over, still screaming. She can’t stop screaming or slamming his skull into the ground because he has to die. If he doesn’t die, she isn’t safe, and Lucifer and Trixie and Dan and Ella aren’t safe and she can’t let that happen, she has to protect them, has to-

An arm snakes around her middle, and she thrashes as Lucifer hauls her up, away from the body. Chloe sobs as he pulls her in and cradles her close, deep, racking sobs that wind their way through her core like a glittery ribbon of broken glass. 

Lucifer whispers into her hair, keeping her pressed against his body. So much of his bare skin pressed against her makes her sick to her stomach, not because its him, just because she feels so raw and vulnerable, like an exposed nerve being grated down to a little nub. 

Something feels hot and wet against her abdomen, and she peels herself away from Lucifer, looking down. He’s bleeding, little gulps of red bursting out from a new bullet wound a few inches to the left of his navel. The blood almost looks black in the stark light as it spills down his pelvis and across his thigh. “You’re hurt.” Her voice is strangled by her sobbing.

“It would seem so.” Lucifer drops one hand down to press on the wound, swaying woozily in place.  
Chloe presses her hand on top of his, trying to keep his blood inside of him where it belongs. Her vision is blurry, making it hard to focus. Her wrist throbs like static, almost numb with pain from the elbow down. 

The truck is still running. “Can you walk?”

Lucifer takes one half-hearted step forwards and nearly collapses, but Chloe is there to support him, and together they limp towards the truck. She maneuvers him to the back seat and helps him up, as much as she is able to with one functioning arm. Lucifer folds his tall frame into the seat and wriggles around until he’s half laying down, his bloody wings splayed awkwardly around him. Chloe digs through the glove compartment, hoping to find something she can patch him up with, but there isn’t anything. It’s clearly a vehicle that’s able to be abandoned at a moment’s notice post-crime, devoid of tools or personal possessions. Pierce, the sick fuck, is still finding a way to screw them from beyond the grave. 

Chloe slams door viciously and teeters into the driver’s seat. It’s an older truck, so there’s no built in nav, but there is a mostly full tank of gas. More than enough to get them back to Los Angles. She thinks. She hopes. 

“Are we leaving Cain here to rot?” Lucifer’s voice winds through the air towards her like a drunken snake, slurred and vague.

Chloe throws the truck into gear and makes a wide U-turn. She doesn’t comment on Cain. She can ask later, when they are both out of mortal danger. It means something, but she’s so tired she honestly can’t remember why it’s important. “Keep pressure on the wound,” she commands instead. She keeps her broken wrist cradled against her chest, the other hand white-knuckling the steering wheel. She stares at her hand, at the way her bloody, scarped knuckles look like they belong to someone else. It doesn’t look like her hand. She hasn’t worn her wedding ring for a few years now, but oddly she finds herself missing it. Not the connection the ring implies, just the steadiness of seeing it rest in the same place when she closed her eyes to sleep at night, and still having it be there when she woke in the morning. She misses its weight.

Chloe cranks the heat in the truck as high as it will go, hoping that it will stop the shivers wracking Lucifer’s body.

Soon, she’s sweating, and he’s gone quiet. 

Their little two-lane road eventually meets up with the 14, and Chloe turns south, heading towards Los Angeles, her mind blank as Lucifer’s breathing grows raspy and the needle on the speedometer creeps past seventy, eighty, ninety. 

She hates to admit it, but now that safety is within her grasp, she’s absolutely petrified. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t take Lucifer to a hospital, with his wings the way they are, but she can’t _not_. He’s bleeding out in this shitty truck, on the verge of death. She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s completely paralyzing her.

A few other cars flash past, heading north, but she doesn’t think to stop and ask for help. There isn’t any point, because she has an injured archangel in the back seat with a twenty-foot wingspan of bloody, glow in the dark feathers. She may be half out of her mind as she speeds down this desert highway, but inflicting that sight on a random passerby is out of the question. That much she knows. 

Lucifer has been quiet for a while, too long, and Chloe throws a glance at him in the rearview mirror. His eyes have the sort of loose and heavy-lidded look of the heavily medicated. “Hey! Lucifer!”  
His eyes focus and he stares blearily up at her. 

“You have to stay awake, okay? Keep pressure on the bullet wound.”

He nods. It’s small enough to be a trick of the jostling in the truck, but Chloe decides to think it’s not. 

“Help me plan,” she finds herself babbling. White-hot shoots of pain lance through her right arm with every twitch, every bump on the road. “I don’t know what to do, Lucifer. I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do, please, tell me what I need to do…” she trails off. Little flashing lights keep dancing across her vision. Not the gold of headlights or scarlet of tail lights, but some warbling, unsteady color in between. She’s starting to hallucinate, she thinks. She’s been awake for so long at this point (seventy-two hours? Longer, she thinks, by honestly, she’s lost track) that each blink seems to suck up hours, the road flashing by in stuttering gasps. 

Her words turn into nonsense, and Lucifer stays quiet, and without warning, they’re back amongst the neon glow of Los Angeles. Chloe isn’t sure when it happens, exactly, because one moment they’re in the mountains, passing through darkness, and the next there are cars around. Not a ton, it’s late, or early, she isn’t sure- the little green numbers on the digital read out won’t stand still long enough for her to wrangle them in her brain into something legible. The streets are quiet, or as quiet as they ever are in downtown. Not many cars, not a lot of traffic, which is good for her since she’s a cop and just this once maybe it’s okay if she speeds, just a little bit.

She blinks again, and the truck is idling crookedly on the street in front of LUX. Chloe throws herself out the driver’s seat and somehow manages to drag Lucifer out of the back one-handed. He perks up a little, not really conscious, but able to be shifted with some help. Chloe pulls his arm over her shoulder, so his body is pressed in a firm line against hers and steps forwards, one foot at a time, into the club. 

The doors are unlocked, and the building is empty and dark. 

For some reason, that surprises her, but she isn’t sure why. She doesn’t really know why she came here, really, other than this place, his penthouse, always feels safe in a way that she can’t define. It’s a place where the rules don’t really apply. Lucifer can be the Devil there, and it doesn’t feel so strange. 

They reach the elevator, and she blinks again, and then they’re spilling out into the penthouse. 

It’s empty. 

Chloe wants Maze to be here. She wants Dan, or Ella, or even Amenadiel. Someone who can help her fix Lucifer. Who can stop the bleeding and make his wings not do that terrible, pained fluttering thing they’ve been doing for the past few hours. She needs help, because she’s only human, and the only thing that’s kept her from blacking out for the last twelve hours or so is the knowledge that her partners life is one hundred percent dependent on her staying alive and conscious and moving. 

Chloe wants nothing more for this all to be over. Now that this is a race instead of a marathon, and the finish line is in sight, so tantalizingly close. If Lucifer were to ask her, now, what her deepest desire was, she wouldn’t need his mojo to answer. 

Peirce is dead.

All she needs to do is survive.

Hard, when all she wants to do is sink onto the cold, black marble of his floor and pass out. But she can’t do that. Lucifer needs her. So instead of collapsing, Chloe lurches forwards, hauling her broken archangel with her on unsteady legs that shake like she’s trying to hold up the world. 

She gets as far as Lucifer’s bedroom, and he falls with a groan face-first onto the ocean of black silk. Chloe’s side feels awfully cold without him, and she stands there, swaying, staring at the long lines of his body splayed out before. Of his wings, bloody and fearsome hanging loose on either side, long enough for the last joint of each to brush against the floor. 

He groans again, and like a moth to flame, Chloe is drawn in to the sound of his suffering. 

“Lucifer?” Her voice warbles in the heavy silence of the penthouse. 

“’hould go, D’tectiv,” he mumbles. 

Chloe shakes her head, and immediately regrets it when everything begins to spin even faster. She can’t just leave him here, bleeding from a gunshot wound, he’ll-

“You make me mortal. When you leave, I’ll get better.” He twists his head around to look at her. His eyes are fuzzy with pain, but intent. 

Chloe sinks into a crouch next to the bed and plants her unbroken arm on his shoulder. His skin is clammy and painted in blood from the gunshot wound on his hip, smears of it marring his pale chest and abdomen and thigs like body paint. It’s all over her too. They match. 

“I can’t leave you here.” There’s a reason why she should listen to him, but she’s having a hard time summoning it back to the top of her cluttered mind.

Lucifer’s hand finds its way to her face, and his thumb caresses a gentle line down her cheekbone. “Please, Detective.”

_Don’t. Please._

Another day, another life.

Chloe stands, her vision swimming like she’s underwater. “Promise me you won’t die.”

“Have you ever known me to lie?”

_Point of pride for me, Detective_.

Chloe wobbles towards the elevator, trying to ignore the little nagging voice in the back of her skull that’s yelping at her, the same voice that tells her when she leaves home without her sunglasses, but everything hurts and she’s so tired, and the little voice is silenced by a thousand alarms screaming through the rest of her body.

She gets in the elevator and goes down, moving on autopilot. With each passing second, her wrist aches more and more. The shock is wearing off, she thinks, and it’s taking its comforting blanket of numbness with it as it withdraws. 

Somehow, she gets back in the truck and drives, following lights that make little sense, patterns that glow red and green, white and amber, soft and amorphous in the passing darkness until there’s a big red EMERGENCY sign blaring rudely against the back of her retinas. Chloe narrows her eyes against the glare and stops the stolen truck under it, throwing on the parking brake out of habit. 

The truck dings at her as she staggers out of the driver’s seat, reminding her that the keys are still in the ignition. It doesn’t matter. It’s not her car. Chloe stumbles towards the sliding glass doors, and they part before her, washing her with a blast of recycled air that smells like plastic and cleaning solution. 

There aren’t many people in the waiting room. They’re nothing more than half a dozen fuzzy shapes to her as she walks towards the intake desk. The nurse sitting there glances up, and does a double take when she sees Chloe, bruised and dirty and covered in blood, standing before her in shock. 

She yells for help, and Chloe finally lets herself collapse. Someone is at her back, holding her arm, keeping her to her feet and they brush against her broken wrist, jostling it. Chloe whimpers as screaming pain whites out her vision, rising up around her like a boiling sea, rising and rising, until she can’t hold on anymore, and she sinks. 

There is a flurry of activity that she isn’t really present for. Voices call back and forth over her as doctors run out and maneuver her onto a stretcher, shifting her limbs around without her permission. Chloe howls internally at being touched by all these strangers, overstimulated and panicking, but she’s so tired and protesting takes so much work. Instead, she starts to cry, tears pouring silently down her face. Sobbing just takes too much energy, so the tears flow with no drama, no noise, just the last of her resistance seeping from a broken tap. 

A doctor shines a pen light into her eyes and asks her a question. Chloe blinks up at her, trying in vain to string the words together in a way that makes sense, but she’s so tired, and it’s so much easier just to float away into the light.

She drifts somewhere for a while, until she feels a pinch at the crook of her left elbow, and cold fluid sinks into her veins. For a moment she panics, thinking of Pierce and the heroin. 

“It’s just fluids and pain medication,” a disembodied voice tells her from somewhere close. Never in her life has she felt something so euphoric, so alleviating. The last of heat of baking in the sun is chased away, leaving her floating in a sea of cool, pleasant water. She cracks open her eyes, but the overhead lights render the voice’s owner into a formless shadow. 

“You can sleep. You’re safe here, honey. It’s okay.”

Chloe doesn’t know if she can trust the voice, but the drugs are tugging her gently towards the twilight of sleep, and she doesn’t want to fight any longer. 

She floats away in the river. 

∞∞∞

An irritating, repetitive beeping tugs Chloe from the bliss of sleep, and she surfaces from a narcotic haze with a low moan that vibrates through the cracked ribs in her chest. Every part of her aches, from the top of her skull all the way down to her toes. It’s… better, though. Carefully, she rolls her ankles, experimenting with the range of motion. They feel sore, not injured, which is good. On her adrenaline high in the desert, she stepped on a lot of rocks and sand hot enough to burn. 

She doesn’t know if it’s the drugs or if she genuinely is feeling better, but Chloe chances prying her eyes open. She blinks against the glare a few times as her eyes adjust, and frowns. For some reason, she expected to wake up in Lucifer’s penthouse. Why is she not in the penthouse?

Her memory comes back in ripples. Lucifer collapsing. The blood. Him telling her to go. The elevator doors closing in a river of gold. 

_Have you ever known me to lie, Detective?_

It’s what he said, but it’s… wrong, somehow. 

_Promise me you won’t die._

_Have you ever known me to lie?_ Only it wasn’t a promise at all. Lucifer doesn’t lie, but does evade and obfuscate. 

Lucifer. 

Lucifer, who is the actual, Biblical Devil. Wings and all.

Chloe presses her hand to her forehead and moans. Somehow, in the light of day when she’s no longer dying, it’s all… it feels like some sort of crazy fever dream. The only reason she knows it’s not is the ache in her bones, the sharp pinging of her broken wrist and the razor-sharp memory of the wings, beautiful and broken and bloody and very, very real. She knows that if she’s lucky enough to get old, to reach an age where her memories start to fade, that that will be the last one to go. It will remain imprinted on her hippocampus until the day she dies, and even then… who’s to say what happens after?

Well.

Lucifer knows. 

Lucifer _knows_, because it’s all real, Heaven, Hell, all of it, and he’s part of it. 

He’s the _Devil_.

Chloe’s weird, floundering thoughts are interrupted by a doctor knocking on the doorframe and letting herself in without ceremony. 

“Hey there, how are we doing this morning?”

Chloe swallows the desert in her throat and manages to turn her head, wincing as her arm is jostled. It isn’t so bad, now. Manageable. She actually feels… okay, somehow. “Okay, I guess. How long was I out?”

The doctor picks up the clipboard at the end of the bed and flips through a few sheets of paper clamped to it. “You came in a little past four am on Sunday. It is currently…” she checks her watch, squinting down at the readout, the same way Chloe’s mom does when she has to read small font on her phone. “Nine thirty-two, Monday morning.”

Chloe blinks. “I slept for twenty-nine hours?”

The doctor smiles reassuringly at her and moves to Chloe’s side. “That’s quick math. How’s your head feeling? I noticed some signs of head trauma, bruising around your scalp, and jaw. Can you tell me what happened?” she gently prods along the bruising, and Chloe tries to sit still for it, not cringe away from this strangers hand brushing over her bare, tender skin. 

What can she say? What can she possibly tell them? That she and Lucifer were abducted by an immortal psychopath (as Lucifer had so aptly called him during one his hissy fits a few months ago) because he wanted to amputate and steal her partners angel wings? The truth would get her locked up in a loony bin so fast her head would spin.

The doctor pulls back, eyes gentle. “I understand that what you went through must have been incredibly traumatic, but it is important that I know at least the broad strokes, so that we can give you the medical care you need.” 

Chloe relents, nodding, trying to formulate an answer. “I don’t… it was… I… we were investigating a murder. I’m a cop.”

“Yes, your emergency contact, Daniel Espinoza, filled us in on your medical history and filled out some forms.” The doctor gestures to the cast adorning Chloe’s right arm from the elbow down. “He told us what he knew, and mentioned that a crime boss of some sort was involved. He is very worried about you.”

“We used to be married.” The vague, platitudinal nature of the statement pulls Chloe back on solid ground. She has to lie. No one can know Lucifer was there, not until they get the chance to dress the truth with an appropriate lie. 

The sounds from the heart rate monitor pick up in intensity. How can they compare stories? Lucifer is a fallen angel. What does he care what some pesky humans think of his activities? They’re nothing but specks of dust of him. 

“I know it’s scary, but this is important.”

Chloe is frozen, heart swelling in her throat. She can’t talk about it, because no one can know what really happened. They can’t-

“Here, what if we go backwards? I ask you about the injuries, and you can tell me if you think we missed anything. Sound good?”

Chloe manages a nod in response. 

“Well, your second and third ribs on your left side are fractured, with significant muscular bruising around it. You have bruising on you jaw and scalp, as well as some on your wrists, but that shouldn’t get much worse than it is now. You also were severely dehydrated when you came in, but your fluids are back at normal levels. That cut on your left arm had to be debrided, but it’s clean and there isn’t any sign of infection, so that should be all good.”

None of that sounds like a surprise to her.

“You were missing for almost two days. Were you given anything to eat or drink in that time?”

Chloe shakes her head no.

“Were you given any illicit substances?”

Another quick shake of her head as she deliberately doesn’t think of needles and heroin in the basement in the desert. 

The doctor checks something off on the form. “Now, you don’t need to disclose any details at this time, but do you need a rape kit?”

Something dark and broken threatens to rear to life in her. Chloe is hyper aware of how this looks, her turning up in a stolen car in front of the ER, bruised and covered blood, in a dirty bra and panties, eyes wild and a pair of broken handcuffs hanging from her wrist after being missing for two days. Especially since Lucifer isn’t here. It looks like she was taken alone and moved to a secondary location. She’s a cop, and if she didn’t _know_, then she knows exactly what she would think, given the situation. 

But she does know. 

None of this was about her. She’s just collateral damage.

_I will not be some weak mortal_.

“I don’t need a rape kit.”

“Okay.” The doctor asks more questions, and Chloe answers in monosyllabic burps of sound that don’t mean anything to her. 

The rest of the conversation passes in a fuzz of static.

The doctor leaves, and Chloe watches a patch of sun from the window traverse the green and while floor tiles. The fuzzy feeling in her head has gone from pleasantly vague to worryingly occluding, and she doesn’t care for it. She’s never been like Lucifer, never understood his desire to bury himself in drugs and sex and alcohol. Not until now, at least. He’s the kind of person that, up until two days ago, she had been able rationalize, behavior wise. He had been abused as a child by a crazy, controlling family (and really, that was still true, wasn’t it?) and surrounded himself with delusions of invulnerability and immortality as a way of self-comfort. It was the same thing with the sex, Linda had confided in her, one Tribe night when she was six or seven shots in, and drunk enough for the lines between friend and therapist to blur. That Lucifer craved emotional intimacy and made up for the lack of it throughout his life by seeking it out in meaningless sexual encounters with men and women who had nothing deeper to offer him. Chloe has never been able to forget that, although it has only reinforced her decision that not sleeping with him was the right call. That he needed something different from her. 

That he still needs something different from her. 

“Chloe?”

She tilts her head towards the door, and smiles when the motion doesn’t send another domino-tipping of pain cascading though her body. “Hey, Dan.”

Dan eases into the room, an uneasy smile twisting his face. He rakes over her body with his eyes. “It’s really good to see you with your eyes open, Chlo. I was really worried there for a minute.” He drops into the visitor chair and scoots it closer to her bed side before gently taking her hand, like it’s made of glass. “What the hell happened?”

Chloe smiles at him, because it is so, so good to see a friendly face after all of this. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.” It had been at the back of her mind, in the slower moments, the worry that Pierce would somehow get Dan and Ella like he got Charlotte. 

“What happened?” he asks again.

Chloe’s eyes slide back to the window, to the patch of sun pooling in on the floor, golden and bright. That light is coming from a star that Lucifer, the fallen angel, her best friend, created ten-gazillion-some-odd years ago. “Pierce tried to kill us. He shot me. He shot-“ she stops. He shot Lucifer, but she can’t tell Dan that. Can she?

Dan takes the decision out of her hands. He is many things, but he’s not an idiot. “He shot Lucifer? Is he okay?” Chloe can see the worry and anger swirling in his eyes. Lucifer isn’t in the hospital, and Chloe is positive that he’s still sprawled out in the penthouse, hopefully alive, but alone. For all Dan knows, Lucifer is bound, gagged, unconscious and in Peru or something with Pierce. Or his body is tied to a cement block at the bottom of the Pacific. 

“I think so. Peirce tried to kill us, and then he took us to a cabin in the middle of the desert, and we got away, but he hurt Lucifer, and-“ she falters. What can she tell him that will keep him from worrying too much but still sound believable?

Nothing comes to mind.

“Chloe, where is Lucifer?”

“Dan, please, he’s- he’s gonna be okay, but- you can’t- he just needs some space, after what happened.”

“Chloe-“

“Please, Dan. Please just trust me. I won’t let anything else happen to him. You know I wouldn’t.” She implores him with her eyes to trust her, wishing she had some angel mojo of her own to give him a little push, to make him believe it. 

Dan shakes his head. “Chloe, where is he? Is he at the penthouse?”

She has to lie. 

“No. Listen, Dan, after what happened- Pierce did some bad shit to him, okay? Really bad, but he’s tough. He can make it through this, he just needs a little space, yeah?” And that isn’t a lie, not really. Lucifer’s already really weird about his wings, and Chloe is sure that this whole shit show is only going to make his issues ten times worse than they already are. After all, what can be more traumatizing than someone dislocating two major limbs, drugging you, and threatening to cut you into little pieces, after shooting you a hundred times? 

She can see the gears spinning in Dan’s head, and she can see when a terrible sort of understanding dawns in his eyes. “Shit.”

He doesn’t _know_, but he is a police officer. Conjecture can take him a long way, Chloe knows, especially considering the state she wandered in looking like, and she doesn’t disabuse him of the notion. That’s going into the file for sure. Too many witnesses to pretend otherwise. 

Shit. 

“We need to…” she trails off and tugs insistently at Dan’s sleeve. “Who’s leading the investigation? What do they know?” 

He stares at her, confusion and horror visibly bouncing around inside his skull like a screensaver. Chloe can see, even from here, that he’s freaking out at the litany of awful possibilities the two of them may have suffered at Pierce’s hands. It’s bad enough that half the precinct, Dan included, already thinks Lucifer’s sluttiness is a defense mechanism for past sexual trauma, and that’s only going to get worse now. “Uh… well, after the shootout downtown, everyone knows that Pierce is the Sinnerman, so the FBI took over. Some guy named, uh, Hawkes, I think. We had a BOLO out for the three of you -you, Pierce, and Lucifer- but no one got a hit until you, yesterday morning.” 

“Pierce is dead,” Chloe says dispassionately with an edge of curtness, then adds, with venom, “That fucker had it coming.” 

The sensation of his skull caving under her hands trembles through her veins like fire for a heartbeat, then dissipates like smoke. 

If she had to do it again, she would. No hesitation. 

Dan takes a moment to absorb that, bobbing his head slowly, looking like he’s been wacked over the head with a frying pan. “What happened?”

Chloe breathes, forces herself to stay calm. To compartmentalize. “Peirce took us. I don’t know why, dispose of witnesses maybe. He held us in a little house in the desert.” She frowns, trying to remember the harried drive back to the city. “North, I think. Past Lancaster.” 

Dan slips a notepad out of his jacket pocket and jots all that down. “Hawkes will want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, well, he can wait.” Chloe waves her cast in front of him. “Speaking of, when can I get out of here?”

“I’ll go talk to a nurse.” Dan stands and pats her leg. “I’m really glad you guys made it out.” Normally it bothers her when Dan treats her like a delicate flower, but now she finds herself appreciating his pliability. 

Chloe sinks back into the bed and drifts off. Despite the drugged sleep, she’s still tired. She has a funny feeling that she’s going to feel tired for a while after this. 

It takes a few hours, but eventually the same doctor from before comes and clears her for discharge. Dan helps her fill out the last of the paperwork, and Chloe dresses in street clothes, a comfy sweater and lounge pants that Dan brought for her. It feels good, like slipping back into her old skin. As they walk through the hospital, Chloe tries not let her mind get tugged in the million directions that it wants to scatter.

She knows that, once she leaves, this little snowglobe of plausible deniability vanishes like the flame of a snuffed candle. 

The thing is, she doesn’t want to deny it, not exactly. She cares about Lucifer, she has for a long time, and that hasn’t changed, not in any way that matters. 

It’s just… 

Once she goes, she can’t creep back in and slam the doors on this new vision of reality. They can never go back to how things used to be, and she is terrified that it might be gone. That she might go to LUX and find his penthouse empty, furniture covered in sheets again, with him gone and vanished with an entirely new set of possible places for him to have fallen into. 

That she might go to LUX and find him dead in his bed because she left him and saved herself, and he was less okay that he made it out to be. 

That she might go to LUX, and Lucifer will be there, awake and alive, and… and she’ll have to step off the elevator and talk to him, and somehow, that is the scariest possibility of all. Because how can it be the same between them, after what happened? Lucifer is the Devil. He is, by all accounts, immortal, the great adversary, the punisher who awaits the worst of the worst once they die.

And yet, he’s spent the last few years helping her solve homicides. Her, a nobody. Just some cop who, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter, not considering just how big her fucking universe has just become. Why would he even bother with her? 

Why does he bother with her? Chloe wants to know, and deep down, deep in a tiny, buried little part of her soul that scares her to examine, she wants him to keep bothering. To stay with her, to continue being her partner. To have a shoulder to cry on when the nightmares come, as they always do after something so harrowing. To be a shoulder when he begins to unravel, because she _knows_ him, and she knows he will. 

Her life is separated into many _befores_ and _afters_. Before her dad died. After she became a police officer. Before she had Trixie. After she and Dan divorced. 

Before Lucifer and after Lucifer

Before _Lucifer_, and after _Lucifer_. 

Chloe’s head pounds faintly as she walks across the parking lot and climbs into the passenger seat of Dan’s cruiser. 

This _after_ has a sense of weight to it. As though it is an ending, but also a beginning. 

A beginning of what, though, she doesn’t know. But she wants to. “Can you drop me at LUX?”

Dan gives a cautious look but doesn’t argue. 

The club is empty and quiet, which doesn’t surprise Chloe, considering that it’s a weekday afternoon and the owner has been, to her knowledge, rather indisposed. 

The elevator ride to the penthouse feels like it takes both years and seconds. The ding of it arriving sends her heart rate skittering wildly behind her cracked ribs. This is it. this is her last chance to cut and run. 

She doesn’t. 

The diffuse, amber glow from the bar washes the penthouse in a warm light. Everything is still, heavy with the kind of silence that only comes from abandonment, and for a moment, Chloe’s stomach lurches with the fear that Lucifer has, once again, vanished.

“Lucifer?” His name seems to sound once and die on her lips in the heavy air. 

She steps further into the apartment, treading lightly. Nothing in the living room or bar area appears to have been touched since she was last here. Out past the walls of glass, the late afternoon light bathes the city in gold. As she walks past the piano, keys uncovered and gleaming white in the soft light, she catches the pervasive scent of old blood, like pennies, saturating the air with notes of metal.

“Lucifer?” She calls again, and this time, she hears a little shuffling from the darkness of his bedroom. The curtains have been drawn, draping the room in shadow. Chloe slinks closer, senses on high alert for danger, wishing she had her gun. She climbs the steps to his bedroom and lingers in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust.

Lucifer is right where he left him, sprawled on his belly, pale and dirty, covered in blood. The wings are still stretched out on either side of him, but their light has dimmed, and now they just look like… feathers. Mortal and bloody. 

That can’t be good.

Chloe drops to the floor near his head and paws at his face with her good arm, willing him to wake. Willing for her not to have made a terrible mistake in leaving him here. 

His eyes blink open, languid and unfocused. His stubble has grown into a short beard and there are violet bags bruising the skin under his eyes. 

“Hey. Hey, you.” Chloe runs her fingers along his face again, through his hair, just trying to communicate with his animal-self that she is here, that she hasn’t left him. That somehow, everything is going to be okay. 

“Detective?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

He manages a smile. “You look better.”

Chloe bobs her head in a nod. “I feel better. They gave me the good stuff at the hospital.” She can feel her bottom lip wobbling, like she’s about to cry. Chloe had managed to forget, to glaze it over in her memory, just how awful he looked, but here and now, it’s impossible to ignore. 

“I’m green with envy, Detective.”

She laughs, but there’s no heart behind it. His voice is still thick with pain. “How are you?”

Lucifer manages to raise his hand and wobble it in a so-so gesture that actually does get a real laugh out her. “I’ve been better.”

Leave it to Lucifer, drama queen extraordinaire, to downplay possibly life-threatening injuries. “Can you sit up?”

He does, and with Chloe’s assistance, they manage to get him perched unsteadily on the side of bed with his feet planted on the floor, wings half folded on either side of him. 

Chloe takes a step back to get a good look at him. In the thirty-six hours or so he’s been passed out here, he’s healed a remarkable amount. His lower leg is still mottled with bruising, but they’ve faded to the patchy-yellow green of a week’s old injury. The leg itself is straight, and he seems to have no pain from moving it. Cautiously, Chloe touches his ankle and picks at the scraggly remains of duct tape that had hold her homemade splint in place. The heat of the desert flashes across her skin, the coarse sand under her nails and reek of dust and blood and fear in her mouth, and her fingers spasm around his ankle. Lucifer twitches under her touch but doesn’t flinch away. 

“Do you have scissors?”

“There is a small toolkit under the bar. There should be a set in there.”

Chloe rises to her feet and trots to the bar, taking a moment to catch her breath. Seeing him awake and alive and… well, not unharmed, but _okay_, has calmed the disquieting panic bells that can’t seem to leave her alone these days.

Chloe roots out the tool kit, a little red bag, from the corner of the bar and brings it back to the bedroom. Inside, she finds a few different screwdrivers, a box cutter, the scissors, and- 

She freezes, her heart leaping to her mouth, as her fingers close around the handle of a pair of pliers.  
_Pliers and bolt cutters and a saw and men who wanted to cut off his wings and kill them and –_

“Detective?”

She snaps up, finding Lucifer’s dark eyes, letting them pool around her. He reaches out and brushes the side of her face with his hand, rubbing a comforting little circle over her cheekbone. 

“I’m okay.” And she is okay, because they’re here, alive. They made it out. They won. 

Chloe slides the pliers across the floor, out of her line of sight, and carefully uses the scissors to cut away the remains of the splint. It comes off in chunks, crusty with sand and dried blood. She prods gently around the bruising, trying to see if anything feels weird, but stops when she sees a muscle jumping at the corner of Lucifer’s mouth. His _I’m upset but trying to stay cool_ tic, one she is plenty familiar with, after years of working with him. After years of being friends with him, of arguments and sitting next to him in the interrogation room across from a frustrating suspect. 

So she moves up his leg to the bullet wound on his hip. Under the dried blood, there is no sign of a wound. Chloe isn’t a doctor, but she’s pretty sure a bullet embedded in muscle tissue isn’t terribly dangerous. Dan has one in his thigh from about eight years ago being shot by a drug dealer. She has a fragment in her shoulder from being shot by Jimmy Barnes. Lucifer can live with a bullet in his hip. There isn’t even a sign of an entry wound, just more bruising, a little red splotch of irritated skin the size of a golf ball. 

“How do you heal so fast? Is that an angel thing?”

“I am not an angel, Detective.” His voice is sharp and clipped, but there’s no malice in it. 

Chloe throws a pointed glance at his wings, still unfurled on either side of him, and goes back to prodding around the bruise. If she presses hard enough, she can feel a little, hard lump in there that might be the bullet.

Lucifer doesn’t even wince, even though she knows it has to be a little tender, at the very least. “I am the Devil, Detective. Don’t let the feathery burdens foisted upon me by my Father fool you. I am-“  
“Don’t try and tell me that you’re _evil_ or _bad_ or whatever, because we both know that isn’t true.” Chloe glares at him and braces her hand on his thigh. “I still meant what I said, back at Forest Clay’s house. You aren’t the Devil, not to me. I will never see you that way, no matter what you think about yourself,” she talks louder as he opens his stupid, beautiful mouth to protest. “No matter what you think you are, I know that you, Lucifer Morningstar, are a good man.” Unbidden, hot tears press against the back of her eyes, and she digs her fingers tighter into the muscle of his thigh, as if that can _make_ him understand what she is trying to say. 

Lucifer’s jaw opens and closes as he chews on words that don’t make it far enough to be voiced. He gapes at her wordlessly for several long seconds, before snapping his mouth shut hard enough to make his teeth click, and nods slowly. Chloe doesn’t know if it’s a signal that he understands her, or if he merely means for her to continue to play doctor.

Both, she hopes. 

All evidence of the stab wound on his abdomen from Pierce has vanished completely and save for the rusty swirls of dried blood on his chest and stomach, there is no sign that it ever existed. His sunburn has gone as well. Chloe is still a nice shade of tomato red on her face and shoulders, and little bits of it have started to peel. Lucifer, however, thanks to his stupid immortality that is totally and completely _real_, has skin that’s as pale and soft as it always is. 

Chloe lets her hand linger on his chest for perhaps a moment too long before pulling away to look at the stab wounds on his lower back, which have been reduced to thin red lines, that, given another few hours, she thinks, will also vanish. 

Lucifer obediently extends his wings, so they are out of her way, and she hears the creak of strained tendons as they move, the ragged edge to his breathing as the stiffness is forced out of them. 

As crazy and insane and utterly mind-blowing the last few days have been, nothing quite knocks it all home for Chloe as the sight of the wings shifting as Lucifer rearranges them. As she kneels behind him on the bed, something about the sight of his spine and scapula and secondary shoulder blades all shifting to compensate for the weight and movement just… it’s surreal past the point of comprehension for her tiny human mind. That they’re _part_ of him, part of his body, bone and flesh and feather. 

Without thinking, Chloe raises her good hand and lets it come to rest between the wings, over the little knobs of his spine. He’s hot the touch. Feverish, almost. It’s like she’s touching a stature, a piece of marble that’s been baking under the sun for hours, except for the gentle give of his skin.

Lucifer freezes so absolutely under her hand that for a moment, she think’s he’s stopped breathing. 

_Don’t, please_.

But that was another life.

That was _before._

“Detective.” It’s a plea of a different nature. 

Gently, moving slowly and cautiously so she doesn’t frighten him away, Chloe shifts until her stomach is almost touching his back. She doesn’t close the rest of the distance, because his wings are still ragged, and the sling holding her broken wrist is in the way, but she can lean close enough to drop her chin into his shoulder, so she does. She presses the side of her face to his scruffy one, and carefully slings her good arm around his neck so he’s trapped in a hug. Not the anaconda variety often imparted forcefully by Ella, but something gentler and more open, that says _my love is here for you to take, if you want it._

She thinks he does want to take it. 

She wants him to. 

“Why are you- why? You’re here, with me still. Even though it- even though it was my fault, Cain, Charlotte, all of it. I don’t- I don’t understand.” Lucifer’s voice is shaky with weakly controlled emotion, as though he’s barely keeping it all in. 

Chloe places a whisper soft kiss above his left ear. “Because I want to be.”

He shudders, and the wings flutter in agitation. Lucifer groans, the sound sharp and raspy, and that breaks Chloe out of the moment. He’s still injured. The rest of him is okay, but wings, it seems, heal slower than broken bones and gunshots on other parts of angel anatomy. 

An interesting factoid to stuff into her ever-expanding mental filling cabinet she’s decided to name ‘Celestial Bullshit’. “Lay down,” Chloe commands, tenderness all but vanished from her voice. Lucifer doesn’t need tender right now. He needs someone who can fix whatever is still hurting him. 

He is surprisingly obedient, all things considered. For one brief moment, Chloe’s thoughts snap to something filthy and perverted as he sprawls supine below her on the bed at her orders, still naked. It stirs something in her that she slams into the bottom drawer of her mental filing cabinet to examine later, _in private_, when he isn’t hurt. 

Not when the wings are still…around. Materialized. Whatever. It’s not like they just fold up on his back, do they? She’s seen him naked plenty, and she’s never seen hide nor feather of them, aside from those two monstrous, crescent shaped scars from where he had cut them off the first time. Logic leads her to believe that he has some way of making them go away, and Chloe knows from his endless maniacal ranting about his father and his wings and being controlled and manipulated that the only reason that he’s even still tolerating them being on the same plane of existence as the rest of him is because he absolutely has to.  
“Can you put them away?” she asks, just to check that box. She is a detective, after all. Everything has a procedure, and things tend to go more smoothly when one follows said procedure. 

Even something as weird as this. 

“Oh, yes, I just though they looked nice with the decorations,” Lucifer snaps peevishly. 

Chloe pinches his calf. “Be serious. I thought you were just some crazy guy until, like three days ago, remember? Cut me a little slack.”

Lucifer grumbles into his pillow, and nods. 

“Okay, good.” That weird thrill again, low in her belly. Why is he never this cooperative when they’re working on a case? He must be tired. “So, what’s wrong, then?” It could be anything really. The memory of Pierce wrenching the wing out of its socket plays in her mental theater with a disgusting squelch, and Chloe shudders. 

Lucifer takes a long time to answer. “They just hurt,” he finally says. His voice is hoarse and low. “Being shot didn’t get things off to a great start. Everything that followed was certainly not a walk in the park either. But, at the end there, when we were fighting, Cain got a good lick in and broke something, I think.” He winces, then adds quickly, “It’s still healing, but it will be fine.”

Chloe takes a few minutes to really look at the wings, to study them not as his friend or as a human awed by divinity, but as a cop. As a detective.

There are dozens of bullet wounds, but they are clustered primarily around the top edge of the wing, along the bone, and the forwards part that some vague memory tells her is called the flight feathers. She reconstructs the gallery and the gunmen in her mind, the position the wings must have been in, and slowly it slots together, until…

“Lucifer? Did you… did you use your wings to shield us from the gun fire?” It isn’t really a question. The evidence is right in front of her.

Lucifer tilts his head so he can see her, one dark eye tracking her in the low light. “I wasn’t about to let them shoot you, Detective.” His tone is defensive, like he expects her to reprimand him.  
Chloe chokes down the lump in her throat, unsure of how to reply. 

“And I would do it again, and again, Detective. They’re good for that much, I suppose.”

Chloe doesn’t know what to say to that. What the hell _can_ she say to that? Nothing comes to mind, so she goes back to inspecting the wings, her heart glowing. The bullet wounds here aren’t nearly as healed as the one on his hip. Below the feathers, they’re still red and puckered and angry, and when she prods at one, a little burp of blood oozes from the wound. With dawning horror, she realizes what’s going to have to happen. 

Bullets left in masses of muscle tissue is one thing. 

Bullets left in a delicate appendage like a wing is an entire other animal. Especially when it’s dozens, or even hundreds, of bullets. How can Lucifer possibly function with them like this? He can’t, clearly. He isn’t. There’s a reason he’s spent the last day and a half in an unmoving heap while she was in the hospital.  
“Lucifer, we need to get the bullets out.”

Lucifer doesn’t protest right away, which tells her all she needs to know about just how dire the situation is. 

Chloe climbs off the bed, considering her options. Lucifer watches her pace, his face unreadable. He offers no suggestion, but she knows without having to ask that cutting them off is not a course of action he is willing to take. Friends can read one another like that. He doesn’t want to, and even if he did, there is no way in a million years that Chloe would ever let him mutilate himself like that again. Not on her watch. Not when she can help him.

As she paces, she catches sight of the pliers halfway under the bed, and her gut clenches. “Oh, no.” But there really isn’t another way, is there?

She picks them like she’s handling a tarantula. Lucifer, to his credit, only flinches a little at the sight of them, and Chloe pointedly ignores that. This has to get done, one way or another. It’s the lesser of two evils. “I should disinfect these,” she says instead.

Lucifer nods towards the bar. “Grab something for me too, would you?”

It’s a fair request. Lucifer drinks like a bucket with a hole at the bottom on a good day, so Chloe brings an entire bottle of something old and expensive over after tipping a little across the pinchy bits of the pliers. It’s not great but considering that there isn’t a surgeon and a sterile environment on hand, it will just have to do. 

She makes Lucifer shuffle around again, so his head is at the very corner of the bed and the wings are easily accessible to her on the floor. He would probably be more comfortable in the middle of the bed, but she doesn’t want to have to crawl all over him and jostle the wings. 

Chloe hands him the bottle and takes her pliers and glass from the bar. “All right, here we go.” Her hand is shaking around the grip, and she takes a moment to silently curse Pierce in whatever circle of Hell he’s currently roasting in for breaking her dominate arm. This is going to be even harder with her left than it would otherwise. 

Chloe is aware that she’s stalling, but she really doesn’t want to do this.  
Lucifer’s back muscles have been clenching tighter and tighter, and she can see that he’s right on the verge of snapping at her to get a move on, so she just does it, plunges into the nearest bullet hole and jams the tip of the pliers in there.

Lucifer hollers and rips the wing away from her, knocking her back on her ass. A scattering of fresh blood drips across the feathers, ruby against white and rust. 

Chloe stares at him in shock, her mind carefully blank. Holy shit, she can’t do this. She can’t just sit here in silence as Lucifer writhes and screams under her hands. She’s not cold enough for that, not in a million fucking years. “Lucifer, I-“

“No, Detective, please, just do it please, I need-“ his words are almost sobs.  
He is coming undone. 

Chloe wants to pet his face, to soothe him and tell him it’s almost over, but she can’t lie to him like that. Quietly, she says, “Lucifer, you need to stay still. I can’t do this if you can’t stay still.”

There is a long moment of awful, prickly stillness, then Lucifer slowly brings the wing back into arm’s reach. He takes a swig from his bottle, chugging its contents like a Gatorade, and Chloe gets back to work. She doesn’t let herself think about it. She just _does_. 

The pliers go it and immediately touch something hard. Lucifer winces, and the feathers on the wing prickle out like needles on a pine tree. He doesn’t move, but Chloe can hear a whine grinding in his throat. Slowly she pulls on the little lump of metal, trying not to damage anything, and the second it’s out and she flings it into the empty whiskey glass. 

Lucifer smushes his face into the bed and says nothing. 

Chloe finds another bullet hole, and pokes in as gently as she can. “You’re doing so well, Lucifer. So well. I’m so proud of you, you know, you’re doing great, keeping it together for me,” she begins to mindlessly babble as the second bullet finds a home in the glass, spewing praise just so he can hear something other than the pings of metal hitting glass or his own flesh being scraped open. “I’m so happy you’re okay, because I love you and you’re the best partner I’ve ever had, and you’re my best friend, like, ever. Not even just now, but in my whole life, you know?” A third bullet joins its compatriots. “I’ve never had a friend I cared about as much as I care about you, in my entire life. Not even as like a kid when you meet people and you think you’re gonna be together forever.” A fourth.

She keeps it up, pausing to stroke the parts of the wing that aren’t flecked with blood, few as they, just so he can feel something nice, in between it all. 

It feels like hours, but probably isn’t, and Chloe finally pops the final bullet out. The glass has long overflowed and the bullets are scattered around her feet in a silver puddle. She feels numb and worn down, like she just ran a marathon, and her neck is cramping to the point of pain. None of that matters, though. Lucifer is what matters. His eyes have taken on that glassy, distant look again, but the lines of pain around them have eased. 

Chloe tosses the pliers aside and leans against the side of the bed. She rests close so her forehead touches his. “Better?”

It takes a few minutes to gather the words, but then Lucifer makes a tiny noise of affirmation deep in his throat. They sit like that in silence, just breathing, until Lucifer sort of shakes himself back to the present. “Thank you, Detective.” He audibly swallows, and Chloe can see his pupils have blown wide, a circle of true black against his slightly lighter irises.

“Are you actually drunk?” The question takes both of them by surprise.

Lucifer snorts. “I wouldn’t say drunk, Detective, although you do have a considerable dampening effect on my supernatural constitution.”

Chloe kicks one of the stray bullets away across the floor. “I’ve noticed.”

Lucifer doesn’t look himself, with the scuff that’s far past its usual artful stubble and dark bags under his eyes. And he’s still covered in blood and grit from the desert. A wild idea pops in to Chloe’s brain, and before she can talk herself out of it, she rises to her feet, gripping his shoulder for support. “Let’s get you cleaned up, yeah?”

Lucifer manages to sit up alone, and Chloe can feel his eyes on her as she walks back towards the bar. “What are you doing?” he calls as she roots around under it. 

There. She peels a garbage bag off the roll and slips her sling off her shoulder with a well-practiced motion. At least the Jimmy Barnes shooting was worth something. With that whole mess came two lessons: how to plastic wrap and injured arm, and to never get splints and casts wet unless you want to walk around smelling like dirty socks for two weeks. 

Lucifer emerges from his cave and stares at her blearily, swaying gently from side to side. “What on earth are you doing?” he asks again. 

Chloe neatly tucks the bag around her cast and knots in place. “I’m wrapping my cast so it doesn’t get wet in the shower.” She’s careful to keep her voice as matter-of-fact as possible, so he doesn’t get any funny ideas.

Lucifer tilts his head in confusion, as he does when he is confounded by something rather ordinary. Chloe has to image that that’s been happening a lot more since he met her. He’s an ageless immortal being, but sometimes he’s just so… clueless. “Well, you’re certainly welcome to it, Detective, but I have to say, I’m disappointed. I always thought the first time you used my shower, I’d be in there with you, making you scream in pleasure.”

There he is, her old Lucifer, the one who always makes jokes and can’t let the possibility of an innuendo pass him by without comment. It makes her smile. He really must be feeling at least a little better if he can make jokes now. 

“Well, yeah,” Choe says as she kicks off her shoes. “That’s the idea.”

Lucifer gapes at her, at a loss for words. 

“I mean, not the ‘screaming in pleasure’ thing, because I honestly don’t think either of us are up for that at the moment,” she continues as she shucks her sweats, wriggling them down over her feet in a movement that is decidedly un-sexy. She only hesitates for a moment before yanking her sweater over her head. Lucifer has seen her naked, and he’s seen her in her underwear. He’s naked right now, on full display. There are no secrets between them, really, not when it comes to this. “You need to get cleaned up, and I’m not letting you shower alone, not like this. You’ll fall and crack your head and then where would we be?”  
He just blinks at her, like she’s shocked the ability of speech right out of him. That never happens, so, even considering the circumstances, Chloe decides to count that as a win. 

Well. No wasting time then. She doesn’t want to give herself a chance to overthink it and talk herself out of doing this, so she ambles towards his bathroom, leaving it up to him if he chooses to follow or not.  


His bathroom is the size of the bedroom at her apartment, but Chloe strides forwards with purpose, not pausing to gape. It’s clean and sparse, just like the rest of his place, and done up in the same shiny black stone. His shower is ginormous, and she turns it on and fiddles with the knob, listening for the sound of footsteps meaning he’s choosing to join her. 

She hadn’t even considered the possibility that he won’t. That he’ll turn back around and go to sleep. Or that he’ll leave. Or-

He steps into the bathroom, wings furled closely along his back. They’re still puffed up on the bits that she can see, the parts that frame him like some sort of weird feathered backdrop. His eyes are narrowed in suspicion, like she’s playing some kind of mean-spirited joke on him. With the rather spectacular bedhead he has going on paired with his wild eyes, he looks like a drug addict emerging from a week-long bender. He looks like the time _he_ was the drug addict coming off a bender, back when he was being all paranoid and not sleeping. 

Chloe stares at him, letting her gaze linger for a moment longer than she means it to, thinking of things she doesn’t want to contemplate, before turning back and stripping out of her underwear and stepping into the spray in one quick motion. She sticks her face under the water, hoping the heat disguises the flames creeping up her cheeks, and her sunburn screeches at her indignantly. _Ouch._

She senses Lucifer step in behind her and shifts back so her spine is pressed flush against his chest. His shower is actually big enough that they can both be under the water, so there’s none of the usual nonsense of one partner shivering and dripping while the other rinses up. Lucifer nuzzles her wet hair, and Chloe breathes out a little pent-up sigh of relief. 

Without asking, she grabs a washcloth and soaps it up, then turns and begins sloughing all the dried blood off his chest and stomach. It paints his skin in orangey rivulets, and she has to wring out the cloth twice before his front is all clean. “Turn around.”

He turns, and she notices that he isn’t swaying as much anymore. Like the water has sobered him up some. She starts on the wings this time, since they cover most of his backside. She’s gentle, barely touching at first, afraid of causing him any more pain, but when he doesn’t wince, she dares to press a little harder. The wings take a long time, and they both stand in silence as he unfolds them and moves around, until eventually they are a field of pearlescent brilliance once again, even soaking wet and marred by broken feathers and little missing clumps that show skin underneath. 

Despite all that, they’re still the most beautiful thing Chloe has ever seen. 

She strokes the outer edge of his left wing in one long, slow motion, and Lucifer’s eyes close like a cat getting scritches behind the ear. “Better?”

“Very much, Detective.” He steps closer, the wings pressed in tight so they don’t bump her, and says, “Now, will you allow me to return the favor? It seems that cast might be cumbersome.”

Chloe nods, and lets him tilt her shoulders so her back is to him once again. Lucifer shampoos her hair, and massages it against her scalp with his deft pianist fingers, and Chloe can’t quite bite down on a moan of pleasure. Lucifer chuckles in her ear and guides her head back under the spray. To her surprise, he doesn’t make some perverted joke about making her moan. He likes to be unpredictable; she has to give him that. 

Chloe goes for a second round of shampoo just because the first felt so good, and because she thinks it will be four or five showers down the line before she feels properly clean again, but it’s nice to see the last their excursion in the desert wash away into the Los Angeles sewer system. 

She tries to return the favor to Lucifer and soap up his hair one-handed, but he’s so tall and she’s injured, so it just ends with him bent double so she can reach, and they both wind up leaning into each other in paroxysms of laugher at the sight of it, the Devil trying to crouch down so she can shampoo his hair for him. 

When did her life get this ridiculous?

And when did she realize that she wouldn’t trade it for anything?

Chloe leans close and buries her face in Lucifer’s collarbone, ignoring the press of his naked skin against hers. It’s intimacy in a totally-nonsexual way, and because of that, it doesn’t feel weird in the slightest, them being here together. It feels right. 

She feels Lucifer press a kiss to her scalp, and then he murmurs, “You can go, if you’re finished, Detective. I need to deal with forest growing out of my chin.”

She laughs and slips past him out of the shower leaving him to it. She grabs a towel and wraps herself in it, not bothering to get dressed yet, wanting to linger in the sense of peace that she’s found, in the calm that’s finally begun to overtake the panic from the whole kidnapping ordeal. 

Out of the shower, the world rudely reasserts itself. The bedroom is a mess. Bullets are scattered across the floor like rain drops, and Lucifer’s sheets are stained with blood and sand. It’s impossible to pretend that everything is totally fine with that mess around, so Chloe drops to her knees and gathers up the bullets, pliers, and few scattered feathers, and throws them in the trash. The tool kit goes back under the bar, and she wipes up all the blood and dirt she can find, until the black floors are shiny and clean once again. She strips down Lucifer’s enormous bed and hauls the pile of dirty sheets into his closet, where she finds a hamper. 

While she’s in there, she steals one of his dress shirts and buttons it over her bare chest, then slides on a pair of his silk boxer shorts. The clothes smell like him, like vanilla and smoke and a just a touch of sulphur. 

_That’s Hell_, she muses as she breathes it in. _That’s the little bit of Hell that’s part of him, and always will be_. 

Because Lucifer is not an angel, despite the wings. He’s always told her so. That he is the Devil and nothing less. 

And… that’s okay. 

He’s still Lucifer, Devil with a capital D or not. The man, not the myth, is what matters to her. 

Chloe finds some clean linins in a cupboard in the closet and goes to remake the bed.  
Lucifer finds her there, struggling to get the corner of the sheet around his continental mattress with one arm in a sling, and silently moves to help her, getting the sheets tucked around and smoothed over in quick, practiced motions. 

Chloe stands back and watches as he finishes. He’s put on a pair of boxer shorts, but nothing else. The wings are still out, a damp silvery white against his back. Now that they’re clean and almost dry, some of their divine glow has begun to return. He’s shaved down to his usual stubble, and she finds that the returning sense of normalcy settling back around her like a blanket is comfort rather than smothering. 

As she’s watching, Lucifer does a sort of shoulder-roll, and the wings snap out of existence with a sharp flap that stirs Chloe’s wet hair and brushes through the black silk curtains that line the windows, making them ripple like a desert mirage. 

“Guh,” comes out of her mouth in a monosyllabic cough of shock, followed by a much more articulate, “What the Hell?”

Lucifer turns over one shoulder, his back stiff, eyeing her with apprehension. “My apologies, Detective, that was… inconsiderate of me.”

Chloe’s head tilts to the side and all she can do is stare at him because really, when has Lucifer ever behaved in a way that makes sense? It’s not like he’s going to start after she’s figured out the reason that he doesn’t act human in so many ways is because he… isn’t. 

“No, it’s… just surprised me, is all. I’m fine. Really, Lucifer, I’m fine.” Chloe steps closer, into his space. She is fine, really. The weirdness that he brought into her life when he swanned through her door is completely worth it if it means she gets to keep him. 

So really, she’s more than fine. She’s… happy. Happier than she can remember being in a long time. 

Lucifer shifts away from her and flops unceremoniously onto the bed, long limbs folding under his body, and he sighs, a low sound that’s more exhaustion than pain. Chloe doesn’t imagine that he’s gotten any decent sleep for at least as long as she has. Being drugged into unconsciousness is a far cry from restful.  


Chloe watches him breath for a moment, considering, twisting her toes against the floor, then says _fuck it_, and crawls into bed, nudging his arm out of the way so she can lay on her side next to him. She cuddles up next to him, soaking in his heat. Lucifer has always been like a furnace, hot to the touch, like a well-sunned reptile. She plants the palm of her hand in the center of his lean chest, and under it, the steady thunder of his heartbeat rolls. 

After all this, after everything, he is still alive. _They_ are still alive. 

It really is some kind of miracle. 

“Did you mean what you said before?” Lucifer’s voice is soft and quiet and tremulous, like he’s afraid to speak too loudly. Like he’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop and Chloe is suddenly going to come to her senses and run away screaming, and if he only whispers it will keep the spell from breaking for a little while longer. 

Chloe makes a questioning noise low in her throat. 

“That you love me?”

When had she said it? A vague pulse of sound in her ears as she tore bullets from his shredded wings, something she had blurted out the heat of the moment.

But…

It’s true, isn’t it? There’s no one in the entire universe she’s closer to, who she loves more, with the exception of Trixie, but Trixie is her child, so does that even count? Lucifer may be an immortal being older than the universe itself, but he also likes to make groan-worthy puns and has a sweet tooth and can never sit still for more than a few seconds and plays the piano with so much emotion and beauty that it makes her heart ache. Somewhere in the middle, he wove himself in the fabric of Chloe’s life, and now she can’t imagine it without him by her side.

“Of course it’s true, Lucifer.” Chloe moves her hand up to the side of his face and catches his eyes with hers, trying to communicate through touch what she can’t find the words to say. “I meant every word I said. You are the best partner I’ve ever had, and my best friend. Of course, I love you, Lucifer.”

She watches his throat bob, and finally, understanding washes over her like the light of the sun.

_Oh_.

Of course, a man who calls himself the Devil, who has been called Evil with a capital E, would see himself as unworthy of anything but hatred and mistrust and disgust. He is the very personification of low self-esteem covered with humor and sex. Chloe knows this about him, but it’s never occurred to her that, yes, she needs to spell it out for him so blatantly. That maybe, even after all this time, he’s had his doubts that she could ever care about him the way she knows he cares about her. 

Chloe thinks then of their kiss, both the one on the beach when he insisted that he wasn’t worthy of her, and of the one on Forest Clay’s balcony the night Charlotte was killed, when he told her over and over that he was the Devil. 

It’s always been about his self-hatred, hasn’t it?

His feelings for her were never the issue. Those, she’s pretty sure, haven’t changed in a long time. 

It’s always been his feelings about himself.

Chloe wants to smack him on the back of his head. If only he’d figured all this out before, back when they had first tried to give this whole relationship thing a go. 

She wants to smack herself for not reaching out and pushing more, trying harder. 

Lucifer swallows, hunting for the right words, Chloe thinks. That’s okay. He doesn’t need to say them right now, because she knows that he is willing to snap his own leg like a twig in order to try and protect her, and really, that tells her everything she needs to know, doesn’t it? 

Lucifer is still staring at her in wonder, as though Chloe is something that he, even in his long, long life, has never quite seen before. The luminous glow of the setting sun makes his bare skin shine, lends his obsidian eyes an otherworldly black glow. A tiny smile curls at the corner of Lucifer’s mouth, and the lines of exhaustion around his eyes soften, finally. “Then… that’s all that matters, Detective.” His forehead comes to rest against hers. “Chloe.”

Chloe’s heart swells. Her name is a sweet song on his lips, so rare to hear and so full of promise. 

There is a long comfortable silence, and then Lucifer whispers in a voice thick with emotion, “I love you, Chloe. I- there are things I’ve done that I never thought I would do. Things I’ve felt that I never thought possible, and it’s you. It’s always been you. Being around you has changed me.”

Chloe nuzzles closer into him, breathing his scent into her lungs, reveling in having him _here_, safe and whole. “Tell me everything.”

And he does.


End file.
